Quotes from Timothy Morton

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.

I love folding laundry.

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!

Ecological thought rejects consumerism at its peril.

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.

Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.

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.

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.

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.

Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.

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.

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.

I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters in it - a few years into having a job, I burned it.

'Nowness' is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.

Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.

In my experience, academia is a World War 1 kind of a domain, and I do my best to avoid all that trench warfare.

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.

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

We're all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.

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.

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

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.

Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn't popular?

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