Quotes by Timothy Morton - Page 2

Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?
Timothy Morton /
Design
Elegance
Generation X
Designing
Generation
Hippies
Recall
Simpler
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After a lifetime of listening to every Floyd album pretty much all the time - they're etched - 'Animals' is the one I can listen to again and again.
Timothy Morton /
Lifetime
Floyd
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The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.
Timothy Morton /
Garbage
Products
Somewhere Else
Waste
Somewhere
Crust
Go Away
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Bohm's 'ontological interpretation' was so called because of the bad rap the word 'ontology' has had in our correlationist age. As a bit of a put-down.
Timothy Morton /
Interpretation
Bad Rap
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Being seen means that your being is held by the other person without comment, without praise or blame or indifference - just with some kind of open care.
Timothy Morton /
Blame
Comment
Indifference
Praise
Held
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I find it beyond stunning that there is a school of thought or two out there that swears we are into solids and that solids are bad and liquids are good.
Timothy Morton /
Liquid
Stunning
Good Bad School
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When I make music, I often sound better singing as a woman, go figure, so I like to tweak the format and pitch and suchlike of my recorded voice. Sounds better.
Timothy Morton /
Format
Singing
Sound
Tweak
Voice
Figure
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We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it's much cheaper to press that button.
Timothy Morton /
Cheaper
Guilt
Button
Intellectuals
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The trouble with ecological invocations of Nature is that they're like calling for a medieval tool, perhaps a portcullis or an arrow slit, to fix a modern problem.
Timothy Morton /
Calling
Ecological
Medieval
Modern
Trouble
Arrow
Fix
Perhaps
Slit
Tool
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If you're applying for jobs, get a suit now, whether or not you get an interview. Spend as much as you can on it without breaking the bank. It will do you some good.
Timothy Morton /
Applying
Bank
Breaking
Interview
Suit
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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.
Timothy Morton /
Chuck
Letters
Absolute
Landed
Rejections
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It's very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.
Timothy Morton /
Awake
Capacity
Collapse
Future Time Imagination
Urge
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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.
Timothy Morton /
Christmas
Christmas Tree
Defense
Resisting
Tree
Ornament
Resist
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Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.
Timothy Morton /
Ancient
Defining
Fluid
Guilt
Pollution
Abject
Count
Experienced
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Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.
Timothy Morton /
Guilt
Collective
Designed
Unfortunately
Prevent
Specifically
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Trivially speaking, ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means.
Timothy Morton /
Ecological
Interconnected
Realising
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I try to have little or no alcohol when I go to a big conference. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that stuff can regress you really fast, and this is not a good place to regress.
Timothy Morton /
Alcohol
Good Place
Sorry
Conference
Regress
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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.
Timothy Morton /
Accurate
Nevertheless
Adjective
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The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place 'at' a certain 'point' in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.
Timothy Morton /
Catastrophe
Caught
Dimensions
Linear
Wave
Certain Point
Event
Ripples
Wake
Whose
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Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.
Timothy Morton /
Afar
Doe
Pedestal
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Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.
Timothy Morton /
Constant
Disturbing
Nothingness
Presence
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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 timescale.
Timothy Morton /
Manifold
Mist
Shifting
Tied
Haunted
Present
Region
Specific
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In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That's how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.
Timothy Morton /
Breathe
Seconds
Endowed
In The End
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When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it's called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it's called 'Fawlty Towers.'
Timothy Morton /
Fate
Towers
Embody
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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 get an interview.
Timothy Morton /
Aesthetic
Performance Art
Sample
Applications
Event
Interview
Proving
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Applying for a job after finishing a Ph.D is about turning yourself inside out. You've been involved in the most introverted process you've ever done, and now you have to show yourself to the world at large.
Timothy Morton /
Finishing
Introverted
Applying
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If you have suffered from trauma, one of the most healing things that can happen to you is being seen. Being seen doesn't have to mean that someone actually lays their eyes on you, although that certainly helps.
Timothy Morton /
Healing
Lays
Trauma
Suffered
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Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.
Timothy Morton /
Bacteria
Different Ways
Stomach
Dynamic
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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, because for them, it was day.
Timothy Morton /
Brilliant
Haunting
Landscape
Prehistoric
Railway
Arc
Lights
Sang
Tens
Tracks
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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.
Timothy Morton /
Cases
Contemporary
Physicist
Time And Space
David
Map
Onto
Transcends
Underlying
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I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I've been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years. And now I'm going to pour it everywhere.
Timothy Morton /
Liquid
Spilling
Well Known
Carefully
Holding
Pour
Precious
Unleash
Years And Years
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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 dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.
Timothy Morton /
Dominant
High Art
Inception
Movement
Strange
Weird
Since
Call
High
Looked
Mode
Object
Thus
Weird Thing
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If you're facing rejection right now, it's very important to realize, especially in a down market, that it's not personal. Really. Truly. The indifference of the system is also crushing. But perhaps it's better than thinking that someone was out to get you.
Timothy Morton /
Indifference
Rejection
Crushing
Facing
Market
Perhaps
Truly
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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 Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!
Timothy Morton /
Environmental
Episodes
Mates
Rice
Thirty
Cultures
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
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We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you've realised that you're stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there's not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.
Timothy Morton /
Irony
Realised
Stuck
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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 dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.
Timothy Morton /
Bed
Brilliant
Floats
Needles
Pouring
Sap
Smell
Snaps
Sun
Thick
Dusty
Forest
Ideal
Letter
Onto
Pine
Realize
Rises
Trees
Twig
Underfoot
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An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals. So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.
Timothy Morton /
Crystals
Liquid
Salt
Appears
Future Art Time
Work Future Time
Trains
Underground
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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 environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.
Timothy Morton /
Dna
Environment
Grass
Nails
Pavement
Shed
Tree
Big Difference
Mountains
Definitely
Difference
Hammer
Rusty
Spider
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Paradoxically, capital has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body.
Timothy Morton /
Cells
Revenge
Years
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Psychologism holds that logical assertions are percolations of brains. Thus logic is a set of rules for how healthy brains operate. Aside from the infinite regress of a brain determining whether a brain is healthy, we have the infinite regress of the idea 'All concepts are brain percolations' being itself a brain percolation, on its own terms.
Timothy Morton /
Concepts
Infinite
Logic
Aside
Brains
Determining
Holds
Operate
Regress
Thus
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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.
Timothy Morton /
Legal
Lawyer
Possession
Transcendental
Argue
Legal Me Lawyer
Correct
Define
Empirical
Fun Thing
Regarding
Signal
Supposedly
Zoo
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The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.
Timothy Morton /
Earth
Faces
Our World
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Timothy Morton Quotes - Page 2

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