119 Quotes by Timothy Morton

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Nature is…animals, trees, the weather…the bioregion, the ecosystem. It is both the set and the contents of the set. It is the world and the entities in that world. It appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series: crabs, waves, lightning, rabbits, silicon…Nature.

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

Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.

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