#objects

Gossip is what you say about the objects of flattery when they aren't present. ↗

— P. J. O'Rourke

#flattery #gossip #objects #present #say

I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. ↗

— Siegfried Sassoon

#been #believe #change #clearly #done

Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision. ↗

— George Saunders

#being #decisions #during #intention #least

Sometimes, when you get something new, you trick yourself into believing it has the power to change absolutely everything about you. ↗

— Siobhan Vivian

#change

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

#mindfulness #objects #questions #life

When I was seventeen I found a man, or maybe he found me. Away from home for the first time, out of reach of my father’s archaic restrictions and my mother’s culinary insistence, I cut off my hair, dropped my Christian name, wore black and toyed with anorexia, passing incognito among the city workers, just another ant in that vast heap. ↗

— Nell Grey

#objects-of-desire #short-story-collection #solstice #home

Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #inanimate #inanimate-objects #interpretation #literature

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

#patina #stories #things #art

The object of your desire is not an object. ↗

— Jack Gardner

#objects #zen #zen

Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves. ↗

— Christian Nestell Bovee

#another #closely #cure #egotism #excessive