Quotes from Timothy Morton

Inevitably, ecological awareness has this kind of '70s flavour to it.

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.

A job letter, an interview - even a writing sample - have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.

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.'

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

I like being irritating.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Somewhat selfishly, perhaps, I like to think that the best people sometimes take a few goes to get a job.

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.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.

Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.

The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become.

Being a person means never being sure that you're one.