Timothy Morton

“Always say less than you think you need. Inject some space into the conversation.”

“Everything is a railway junction where past and future are sliding over one another, not touching.”

“Since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it, with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy.”

“The Left is correctly wary of talk about nonhumans in the key of Nature and its spiritual partner, humanity.”

“Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?”

“An adjective, such as 'flimsy,' describes someone's access to a thing, such as 'argument.' But that's just that someone's access. It may be accurate. But it's theirs nevertheless.”

“I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.”

“Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.”

“I'm the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.”

“In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying 'implicate order' that transcends time and space.”

“Before there was Bjork, there was Prince. That's a very simple encapsulation of my personal pop life.”

“It's easier to be the art school band than to be the Beatles.”

“I love folding laundry.”

“In the U.K. - correct me if I'm wrong - there is a legal definition of 'not being in possession of yourself' aka 'not being a person.' That's the fun thing: someone such as a lawyer needs to define, using some empirical signal, something supposedly transcendental like 'person,' something lawyers argue and argue about regarding, say, chimps in zoos.”