Frozen Desire Quotes

“My wages came to me not to satisfy any need-- mine were anyway private, affectionate, atrocious-- but to make my needs universal: to incorporate me in the mainstream of men and things in which my work was not for me but for everybody; and to take what was special in me, my most secure and precious sense of myself, and make it general and banal. In short, I was to be civilized.”
― James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

“I have found the funerals of friends less harrowing than the auctioning off of their property: a unique and loveable nature, already contracted to its inert possessions, is broken into money and dispersed for all time.”
― James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money

“Money is normative. So pervasive is its influence on our lives that it makes less moneyed ages incomprehensible, consigning them to barbarism or folklore. Yet history is not inevitable: antiquity did not aspire to our present condition and might have generated a quite different present.”
― James Buchan, Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money