Reading the Way of Things Quotes

“Every thing consumes the world in its own way and, in so doing, creates itself. This is what we call comportment, the way a thing hangs in the world, the way it carries itself in the world.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

“All of which is to say, the way we make sense of things is rarely to engage the things. We don’t confront the things before us as something different; we confront them as something we already know, as if everything fits into pre-ordained buckets of knowledge, as if those buckets weren’t themselves created, as if buckets and categories themselves weren’t buckets or categories that might impede knowing.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense

“Things, we are taught, are instances of ideas, concepts, and categories that are not themselves up for grabs. Blue is blue; boys are boys; big is big.”
― Daniel Coffeen, Reading the Way of Things: Towards a New Technology of Making Sense