Quotes from Timothy Morton

Beauty is how objects end. Beauty is death.

I call this double truth of a thing its fragility, the inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction.

Personhood then is also in the mesh-- it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we discover that it is full of holes

Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

For beauty to work, there must be a surface capable of receiving the wound.

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy -- for some, strangely or frighteningly 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.

In the event of beauty, a non-self part of my inner space seems to resonate in the colors on the wall, in the sounds pouring into my ears. Hugely amplified, might this resonance actually kill me? "A beautiful way to die" – to be destroyed by vibrations that removed myself from myself.

I think that this music could liquefy my internal organs, make my ears bleed (this has actually occurred), send me into seizures. Perhaps it could kill me. To be killed by intensed beauty, what a Keatsian way to die.

Am I a nihilistic postmodernist or a New Ager in academig drag?

When you see evil as a thing apart from yourself over there, you can fly a plane into it or destroy it with a powerful bomb. You can justify murder. Evil is the gaze that sees evil as a thing apart from me.

It's ironic that we can imagine the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelves more readily than we can the collapse of the banking system-and despite this, amazingly, as this book was written, the banking system did collapse.

The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society.

Death is powerful and compelling; life is fragile and shivery.

We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of real and thing to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The

Perhaps indifference itself is pointing to a way to care for humans and nonhumans in a less violent way- simply allowing them to exist, like pieces of paper in your hand, like a story you might appreciate- or not- for no reason.

Maybe beauty is death, in a way, just like the decadent aesthetes used to say. It's a reminder that things are fragile, because when one thing envelopes another thing, that other thing might be overwhelmed or destroyed.

We are living textbooks on global warming and nuclear materials, crisscrosssed with interobjective calligraphy.

For its part, science is about being able to admit that you're wrong.

The idea that there are multiple worlds because there are multiple lifeforms and that no one world or scale is the right one means that efficiency is only efficient from a particular standpoint. For example, the idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining.

The mysterious quality of artworks is a signal of the mysterious quality of objects in general. Beauty is a secret that we know exists but whose content we don't know. When we share it with other, it's as if we are in on the same secret. We look at each other in amazement or with knowing look. But it's impossible to specify what this secret is. Only the fact that there is a secret is of any importance. Beauty is based on the raw fact of the secret as such.

Beauty is nonconceptual. Nothing in the object directly explains it.

An environment is precisely something one is unable to point to yet is strangely there nonetheless.

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