Edmund De Waal Quotes

#1. I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie's stories.

Edmund De Waal

#2. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.

Edmund De Waal

#3. The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go.

Edmund De Waal

#4. The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalise through distance.

Edmund De Waal

#5. Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them?

Edmund De Waal

#6. Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp ... ' There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others.

Edmund De Waal

#7. Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

Edmund De Waal

#8. The connoisseurs sniff, categorise, rank, price, demote.
Celadons, the colour caught between green and blue, get sky after rain, and kingfishers, and iced water, all of which are lyrical.

Edmund De Waal

#9. You just hope, if you make things as I do, that they can make their way in the world and have some longevity.

Edmund De Waal

#10. There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch.

Edmund De Waal

#11. Japanese things - laquers, netsuke, prints - conjure a picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow.

Edmund De Waal

#12. He stands with his hands in his pockets, well-dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him.

Edmund De Waal

#13. There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something.

Edmund De Waal

#14. Course, and were part of his life with Jiro.

Edmund De Waal

#15. Yangi, a philosopher, art historian and poet, had evolved a theory of why some objects - pots, baskets, cloth made by unknown craftsmen - were so beautiful. In his view, they expressed unconscious beauty because they had been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego.

Edmund De Waal

#16. And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into the house, into the room, into their lungs. Someone is being beaten in the street below. What are they going to do? How long can you pretend this is not happening?

Edmund De Waal

#17. It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.

Edmund De Waal

#18. Propulsion, spewing out smoke, and three-wheeler taxis,

Edmund De Waal

#19. Stories and objects share something, a patina ... Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed ... But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing.

Edmund De Waal

#20. This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.

Edmund De Waal

#21. And so you paint pagodas and carp and phoenixes, but you also paint English country houses, and churches and coats of arms, the crucifixion, inscriptions in Persian and Arabic, carnations and tulips, mottos in Latin and knights in armour and Andromeda. v

Edmund De Waal

#22. House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces.

Edmund De Waal