Timothy Morton

“'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'”

“Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.”

“The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft...”

“There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.”

“I love folding laundry.”

“Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?”

“Humans can no longer ignore nonhumans: they end up haunting the words we use and interrupting everyday talk.”

“I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night...”

“A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call 'an object.' Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement - the dom...”

“'Humankind' is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.”

“My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humani...”

“Aesthetic experiences are powerful, to be sure, and probably inescapable, but Nature will not remain effective for very long.”

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

“Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.”

“The present is haunted by the X-present. I call this manifold of present and X-present 'nowness': a shifting, haunted region like evaporating mist; a region can't be tied to a specific times...”

“It's easier to be Eric Idle than to be Paul McCartney.”

“OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don't behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.”

“When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between enviro...”

“I've managed to persuade Yoko Ono to put some of her work in my Penguin book!”

“Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart - well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to g...”