Objects Quotes - Page 23

• My idea was to chose an object that wouldn't attract me, either by its beauty or by its ugliness. To find a point of indifference in my looking at it, you see

  Marcel Duchamp

  Ideas, Indifference, Ugliness

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• I contemplate the idea that maybe I'm an alcoholic. I get this occassionally, the need to define myself as something-or-the-other, and at various times in my life have wondered if I'm a Goth, a homosexul, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic depressive, whether I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, most regretfully, come to the conclusion that I'm none of the above. The fact is I'm actually not ANYTHING.

  David Nicholls

  Moving, Heart, Ideas

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• Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

  Paul Auster

  Book, Men, Years

  Paul Auster (2011). “Collected Prose”, p.188, Faber & Faber

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• There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

  Paul Auster

  Men, Decision, Solitude

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• The Matisse seemed to respond to the decreasing light by increasing its own wattage. Every object in the room was drained of color, but the Matisse stood firm in the de-escalating illumination, its beauty turning functionality inside out, making itself a more practical and useful presence than anything else in sight.

  Steve Martin

  Light, Sight, Illumination

  Steve Martin (2010). “An Object of Beauty”, p.75, Hachette UK

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• I couldn't take much more of this. Being the object two men competed for wasn't as glamorous as it sounded in the movies. The two men who both wanted one hundred percent of my time weren't dashing, international playboys. They were undead and surprisingly immature, considering the youngest was just over a hundred years old.

  Jennifer Armintrout

  Men, Years, Two

  Jennifer Armintrout (2008). “Blood Ties Bundle: Blood Ties Book One: The Turning\Blood Ties Book Two: Possession\Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes\Blood Ties Book Four: All Souls' Night”, MIRA

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• Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.

  Bruno Schulz

  Animal, Men, Example

  Bruno Schulz, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Goldfarb (2008). “The street of crocodiles and other stories”, Penguin Classics

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• While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Mean, People

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• Everyone has their first date and the object is to hide your flaws. And then you're in a relationship, and it's all about hiding your disappointment. And then, once you're married, it's about hiding your sins.

  Joss Whedon

  Disappointment, Firsts, Married

  "Dollhouse (A Spy in the House of Love)". TV Series, www.imdb.com. 2009–2010.

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• Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling... When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience.

  Edmund Burke

  Pain, Ideas, Giving

  "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful". Treatise by Edmund Burke, www.bartleby.com. 1757.

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• No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.

  Virginia Woolf

  Moments, Sideways, Mark

  Virginia Woolf (2016). “To the Lighthouse”, p.166, Tyché

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• We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

  Philip K. Dick

  Information, Messages, Facts

  "VALIS".

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• This is my life, I think. I am an accumulation of objects.

  David Levithan

  Thinking, Accumulation

  David Levithan (2009). “Boy Meets Boy”, p.61, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.

  Terry Pratchett

  Travel, Adventure, Sleep

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• I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

  George Orwell

  Thinking, Space, Identity

  George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.351, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin ‘freely’- as light preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have a heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.

  Jane Austen

  Encouragement, Gratitude, Believe

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• Possibly it had occurred to him the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. [...] It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Stars, Moon, Light

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli (1991). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby”, p.73, Cambridge University Press

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• When I cannot bear outer pressures anymore, I begin to put order in my belongings...As if unable to organize and control my life, I seek to exert this on the world of objects.

  Anais Nin

  Order, World, Pressure

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• He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!

  Peter Shaffer

  Husband, Caring, Boys

  "Equus". Book by Peter Shaffer, 1973.

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• Dark matter has a gravitation effect on other objects. You can't see it, you can't feel it, but you can watch something being pulled in its direction.

  Jodi Picoult

  Dark, Watches, Matter

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper - Movie Tie-In: A Novel”, p.149, Simon and Schuster

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• Men protect things they find important," Galladon said with a shrug. "If you object, you shouldn't have made yourself so irreplaceable.Kolo?" -Brandon Sanderson (Elantris)

  Brandon Sanderson

  Men, Important, Made

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• I probably coughed self-pityingly in response, little aware that I was about to cross a tremendous threshold beyond which there would be no return, that in my hands I held an object whose simple appearance belied its profound power. All true readers have a book, a moment, like the one I describe, and when Mum offered me that much-read library copy mine was upon me.

  Kate Morton

  Book, Simple, Self

  Kate Morton (2011). “The Distant Hours: A Novel”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• An object is not so attached to its name that we cannot find another one that would suit it better.

  Rene Magritte

  Names, Suits

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• Imagination magnifies small objects with fantastic exaggeration until they fill our soul, and with bold insolence cuts down great things to its own size, as when speaking of God.

  Blaise Pascal

  Cutting, Small Objects, Imagination

  Blaise Pascal (2008). “Human Happiness”, Penguin Group USA

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• It isn't a matter of how long, or even how much you know. It's a way of looking at things, how much you see and how you think. I suppose it's, well, perspective. . . When you start seein' five sides to a four-sided object, that's when you get the gray robe.

  Hilari Bell

  Thinking, Long, Perspective

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