50 Objects Quotes

Of all the works of man I like best Those which have been used. The copper pots with their dents and flattened edges The knives and forks whose wooden handles Have been worn away by many hands: such forms Seemed to me the noblest.

I feel sorry for confetti. Its useful life lasts about two seconds. And it can never be used again.

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

Zippers are primal and modern at the very same time. On the one hand, your zipper is primitive and reptilian, on the other, mechanical and slick. A zipper is where the Industrial Revolution meets the Cobra Cult.

I plugged my phone in where the blender used to be. I called someone. They went 'Aaaaahhhh...'

We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

The child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.

I bought some used paint. It was in the shape of a house.

That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

Pearls mean tears.

'I've got an oscillating fan at my house. The fan goes back and forth. It looks like the fan is saying 'No'. So I like to ask it questions that a fan would say no to. Do you keep my hair in place? Do you keep my documents in order? Do you have three settings? Liar! My fan fucking lied to me. Now I will pull the pin up. Now you ain't sayin' shit.'

I like wearing this pass, because it lets me know when I'm upside down.

He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.

To a collector of curios, the dust is metadata.' in Everything is Miscellaneous p. 233

Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?

He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.

Logo for the Macintosh: An Introduction through Object Logo (1992)

'Didn't this used to be our dining-room table back at Sutherland Street, Frank?' said Kathleen.

My mother and her little brown jug It held her milk And now it holds our memories...

This is a CD called HIT AND MISS.

Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.

(a few minutes later) I bought one of those little glass ball things with the snow in it... Just checking.

I have a decaffeinated coffee table. You'd never know it to look at it.

'The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become an object of thought, instead of guiding it.'

'The Red Wheelbarrow' from Spring and All (1923)

We're worth a lot of dough. Whatever you see is antiques. This thing here. This is from - I don't remember exactly. I think it's the Renaissance or the Magna Carta or something. But that's where it's from.

I love manikins. I want to bring them to life. I give mine names. I feel as if I know them. I'll often talk to them in my living room. ~Rolling Stone 1983

I don't care what you do to a box, it's still a box

I dont like jam, I dont want it to know where I am

Oh look! Souvenirs!

The Lord Octesian's arm-ring had a curious fate. Eustace did not want it and offered it to Caspian, and Caspian offered it to Lucy. She did not care about having it. 'Very well, then, catch as catch can,' said Caspian and flung it up in the air. [...] Up went the ring, flashing in the sunlight, and caught, and hung, as neatly as a well-thrown quoit, on a little projection on the rock. No one could climb up to get it from below and no one could climb down to get it from above. And there, for all I know, it is hanging still and may hang till the world ends. (ch. 7)

Hip flasks are the juice machines of the alcohol world - everyone has one and it never gets used.

Charlotte once ran away from me, outside the studio, and I grabbed her dress to stop her, to keep her near me. A yellow cotton dress I loved because it was too long for her.

Jack Benny: Where's that big glass star I told you to pack away last Christmas?

Rochester: You mean that shiny one with the three points on it?

An ink bottle, which now seems impossibly quaint, was still thinkable as a symbol in 1970.

The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)

This is an artifact and that was a relic. This is alive in the now, whereas that merely remained.

The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are.

And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.