objects

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

Nobody ever chooses the already unfortunate as objects of his loyal friendship.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

We were astonished by the beauty and refinement of the art displayed by the objects surpassing all we could have imagined - the impression was overwhelming.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

Intelligence is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.

For me, all the materials and objects I employ come from a specific space that's very personal.

It's not as if we're running a hospital for sick children down here, let's put it that way. Where's the nobility in patching up a bunch of old tables and chairs? Corrosive to the soul, quite possibly. I've seen too many estates not to know that. Idolatry! Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only__f you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn't it? And isn't the whole point of things__eautiful things__hat they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?

Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.

Designer turns daily common objects to sexy and interesting stuff but not necessarily functional.

Her father dropped her off in front of the place where she was to live and left the engine running. Lila Mae removed the two suitcases from the back of the pickup truck. The suitcases were new, with a formidable casing of green plastic. Scratchproof, supposedly. Her father had only been able to afford them because they were, manufacturer's oats aside, scratched _ gouged actually, as if an animal had taken them in its fangs to teach them about hubris.

I__ relieved to seethat even brilliant physicists make mistakes.__ohler looked over. __hat do you mean?___hoever wrote that note made a mistake. That column isn__ Ionic. Ionic columns are uniform in width. That one__ tapered. It__ Doric__he Greek counterpart. A common mistake.__ohler did not smile. __he author meant it as a joke, Mr. Langdon. Ionic means containing ions__lectrically charged particles. Most objects contain them.

If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it.

A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

... each of us describes our existence by means of objects which are indifferent to us, which survive us, and which are then thrown back into the common stock from which they are soon gathered again and ascribed other roles in other circumstances.

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.