Hyperobjects Quotes

“We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“The strategy of this book, then, is to awaken us from the dream that the world is about to end, because action on Earth (the real Earth) depends on it. The end of the world has already occurred. We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended. Convenience is not readily associated with historiography, nor indeed with geological time. But in this case, it is uncannily clear. It was April 1784, when James Watt patented the steam engine, an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust—namely, the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Personhood then is also in the mesh-- it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we discover that it is full of holes”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Am I a nihilistic postmodernist or a New Ager in academig drag?”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“I think that this music could liquefy my internal organs, make my ears bleed (this has actually occurred), send me into seizures. Perhaps it could kill me. To be killed by intensed beauty, what a Keatsian way to die.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“Where fire really burns and the light itself burns your eyes, where songs are the most beautiful songs you have ever heard, and emotions passed over in daily life take on a horrifying, uncanny hue”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

“We are living textbooks on global warming and nuclear materials, crisscrosssed with interobjective calligraphy.”
― Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World