Objects Quotes

“Sometimes, when you get something new, you trick yourself into believing it has the power to change absolutely everything about you.”
― Siobhan Vivian, The List

“Whatever you eye falls on - for it will fall on what you love - will lead you to the questions of your life, the questions that are incumbent upon you to answer, because that is how the mind works in concert with the eye. The things of this world draw us where we need to go.”
― Mary Rose O'Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd

“The object of your desire is not an object.”
― Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things

“When it comes to sex: some men treat women as objects; some women treat objects as men.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups

“Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.”
― Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

“The truth beyond the fetish's glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, Glass, Paper, Beans: Revelations on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things

“Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked.

T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.'

'What are you going to do? Share them?'

'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. 'We'll burn them,' he said, 'one by one,' and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. 'I'd like to see Old Misery's face when we are through,' T. said.

'You hate him a lot?' Blackie asked.

'Of course I don't hate him,' T. said. 'There'd be no fun if I hated him.' The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. 'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things. 'I'll race you home, Blackie,' he said. ("The Destructors")”
― Graham Greene, Shock!

“She had thought about how everywhere in that place Romans had written the local people out of their history. She was trying to figure out how people valued a thing, what made something revered while other things were overlooked. Who decided what was out with the old, what had to have a replacement? What traditions stayed and what tools, household items, art, things, evidence of someone, languages, fell away. But when she tried to draw a vague line to the artefacts of Prosperous she was stumped — why the artefacts of Middlesbrough were important and not those from home.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Riches do not so much exhilarate us with their possession, as they torment us with their loss.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“Some objects seem to disappear immediately while others never want to leave. Here is a small black plastic gizmo with a serious demeanor that turns up regularly, like a politician at public functions. It seems to be an "integral part," a kind of switch with screw holes so that it can be attached to something larger. Nobody knows what. This thing's use has been forgotten but it looks so important that no one is willing to throw it in the trash. It survives by bluff, like certain insects that escape being eaten because of their formidable appearance.”
― Louis Jenkins

“All the objects which he contemplated with as much curiosity and admiration as gratitude, for if, in absorbing his dreams, they had delivered him from an obsession, they themselves were, in turn, enriched by the absorption; they shewed him the palpable realisation of his fancies, and they interested his mind; they took shape and grew solid before his eyes, and at the same time they soothed his troubled heart.”
― Marcel Proust

“It feels so American to discount dreams because they're not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give is voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The stone, like the North African redware, the bronze saucepan from Italy, the ivory from India, the pottery water containers, the glass bottle in the shape of a West African head, made in Germany, the curator said, or Egypt — it was all a picture, a sculpture — an incidental passage of time, there upon a shelf on the wall. A line of stones that over time had no sure beginning or end to its construction. It was evidence of the other, that it had once been a bustling sort of city in the middle of nowhere, where different cultures came together.”
― Tara June Winch, The Yield

“Improvement, to be found in all things.”
― Alogaristw

“I've kept . . .treasures because fragments of . . .stories are contained in them, and I have honored that.

I think of my family. Objects passed from hand to hand. Stories told, others not talked about. Dear friends and acquaintances recount stories of their own. In public places, behind walls and doors, voices rise. Stories float up and are deposited into the trunk of our collective unconscious. We have only to coax a lock to set the stories free.”
― Sandra Benítez, Bag Lady: A Memoir

“He must create some target for his passions and then arouse his desire, anger, fear, for this object he has created, just like children taking fright at a face they have daubed themselves.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Money is not the success of life; it is only the power of buying the objects”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“The act of posting a letter would become too complex with significance: a walk down the stair-way, over the door-stop, on to the side-walk, across the pave-ment and over to the mail-box. Common objects would dissolve into their primal states, each having an independent life.”
― Charles Jencks, Meaning in architecture;

“We keep stuff in order to hang on to what's important, but it's an illusion ... These objects are not bridges to the past, they're bridges to memories of the past. But they are not the past.”
― Helen Fisher

“In psychological theory, the endowment effect is our tendency to consider an object more important than it really is simply because we own it. This explains why it's so hard for us to get rid of our stuff.”
― Joshua Becker, The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life

“The anxiety that attaches to periodic payments is very specific. It eventually sets in train a parallel process which weighs down on us day after day even though we never become conscious of the objective relationship involved. It haunts the human project, not immediate practice. An object that is mortgaged escapes us in time, and has in fact escaped us from the outset. It flees us, and its flight echoes that of the serial object ever vainly striving towards the model. This dual movement of things away from our grasp is what creates the latent fragility and ever-imminent disappointments of the world of objects that surrounds us.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects

“Objects. Possessions. The material world that we carry around with us, that solders us to events, that outlasts them. The objects with which we manifest love. The possessions with which we possess.”
― Penelope Lively, Perfect Happiness

“To be able to stay strong you have to strain useless objects.”
― Kamaran Ihsan Salih

“Based on the wide range of dangerous objects thrown at the police in the UK riots of 2024, I was surprised no one was killed!”
― Steven Magee

“In every form (object), there is emptiness.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“Emptiness inhabits the world and “lives” within objects.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“To love objects is to love life.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“I sometimes tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen.

And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects, and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he died, that the small elephant was a gift from a friend on a day of heartbreak.

We start talking about those objects and soon it feels like our whole life is full of small stories to be grateful for. So many small things we pass all the time without holding them up to the light.”
― Ada Limon

“Sometimes objects hold more than just their functions,” he said. “They carry our hopes, too. Or our fear of losing things.”
― Anca-Valeria Bancila, The Time Traveler

“At home, I placed the vase in various settings but everywhere I tried, it looked unnecessary, even ugly, so I put it away in a cupboard with other objects I had bought without dedication, because they had briefly offered an idea of something.”
― Aysegül Savas, The Anthropologists