Edmund de Waal Quotes
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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.
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The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go.
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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.
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All art is the result of one’s having been in danger of having gone through an experience all the way to the end when no one can go any further. This is what it is like to be an artist – you are unsteady on the edge of life like a swan before an anxious launching of himself on the floods where he is gently caught.
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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.
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There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch.
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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.