19 Quotes by Edmund de Waal

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.

There is no straight road to finding yourself, to making something.

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn't grasp...' There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others.

There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult's sense of pitch.

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.

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.

The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go.

House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces.

It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan.You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.