Edmund de Waal Quotes
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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.
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He stands with his hands in his pockets, well-dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him.
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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?
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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.
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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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How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten?
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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.