Timothy Morton Quotes

Anyone who has trouble imagining causality as magical and uncanny need only consider the existence of children.

One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.

I’m the absolute worst at getting jobs, ever. I had 100 rejections before I landed one. I kept all the letters in a folder until I realized I could just chuck them away.

‘Free speech’ isn’t speech at all if it’s being used without listening, attention, or care.

Applying for a job after finishing a Ph.D is about turning yourself inside out. You’ve been involved in the most introverted process you’ve ever done, and now you have to show yourself to the world at large.

The belief that ‘animals’ are superior or inferior to humans because they live in an eternal now is untrue, because no being lives in a now.

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

I like to think of myself as the corniest, most awful thing you could possibly imagine.

I used to keep a folder with all my rejection letters in it – a few years into having a job, I burned it.

I like being irritating.

Since when did scientific evidence become a reason to shy away from ecological action just because it wasn’t popular?

A job letter, an interview – even a writing sample – have far less to do with intellect and far more to do with aesthetics than you think.

Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality.

When you watch one person on stage trying to surmount their fate only in that very action to embody it, it’s called a tragedy. When you see a lot of people doing it on stage, it’s called ‘Fawlty Towers.’

American voting districts are, across a lot of the country, deeply messed up by having been gerrymandered by right-wing politicians.

It truly seems to me that there is some kind of shift happening towards ecological awareness – not just in terms of PR for the science.

When you make or study art, you are not exploring some kind of candy on the surface of a machine. You are making or studying causality.

Beauty doesn’t have to be in accord with prefabricated concepts of ‘pretty.’

I’m not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people’s self-interest if that’s what makes them understand something about the non-human world.

Since appearance can’t be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing, attunement is a living, dynamic relation with another being.

We intellectuals are not stupid: we know the phenomenology of guilt is a bad photocopy of the phenomenology of thought, so it’s much cheaper to press that button.

Invoking Nature always measures the distance we have yet to travel to achieve real progress on environmental issues.

Unfortunately, of course, guilt is an artifact of agricultural-age religion and is designed specifically to prevent humans from thinking and operating on a collective level.

I find it beyond stunning that there is a school of thought or two out there that swears we are into solids and that solids are bad and liquids are good.

If you’ve read ‘Dark Ecology,’ you’ll know there’s a whole thing about cats in it, more than once.

Kant described beauty as a feeling of ungraspability: this is why the beauty experience is beyond concept.

I love David Bohm. I started to get into speculative realism because I started reading his work.

I can get quite well known, and then I can unleash this kind of anarchist-hippie thing that I’ve been holding like a very precious liquid, carefully, without spilling any, for years and years and years. And now I’m going to pour it everywhere.

Our ecological emergency demands proactive choices, not reactive sideswipes.

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.

I try to have little or no alcohol when I go to a big conference. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that stuff can regress you really fast, and this is not a good place to regress.

I discover in my experiential space evidence for the wrongness of solipsism, and this evidence is called beauty.

I believe art is a way to attune to what reality is, which is a weird reality.

Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.

A weird thing is a strange loop, what some of us call ‘an object.’ Thus it is looked down on by the constructivist spokespeople of anti-art, which is also an anti-products movement – the dominant mode of high art since the inception of the Anthropocene.

If you’re facing rejection right now, it’s very important to realize, especially in a down market, that it’s not personal. Really. Truly. The indifference of the system is also crushing. But perhaps it’s better than thinking that someone was out to get you.

We like to think, in our anthropocentric way, that irony means that you transcended something, but actually, what it means is that you’ve realised that you’re stuck in something, and you have this kind of uncanny awareness of that, and there’s not much you can do about that feeling of stuckness.

The Severing is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place ‘at’ a certain ‘point’ in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught.

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it’s really not a very good defense – rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

We’re all human beings, in the end, despite our differences.

Being seen means that your being is held by the other person without comment, without praise or blame or indifference – just with some kind of open care.

The noises Russia makes on the world stage are deeply misogynist, homophobic and racist.

Job applications are an aesthetic event. They are performance art. They are not about proving you are smart – well, maybe your writing sample does that, but even then, the main point is to get an interview.

In the end, a lifeform is always a hybrid, a being endowed with some X-power such as being able to breathe for a few seconds out of water. That’s how evolution works. Spectrally. We are all mermaids.

OOO objects have all the abjection added back in. They don’t behave like normalized patriarchal subjects at all.

The ideal job letter starts with a brilliant light. Then we realize that this brilliant light is actually sunlight, shafts of it, pouring through trees onto a thick bed of pine needles. Soft dusty resin floats in the sun shafts, invitingly. The smell of pine and sap rises from the forest floor. A twig snaps underfoot.

It’s very important that we keep our imagination, which is our capacity to open the future, awake at a time at which the urge to collapse into the fetal position is high.

Before there was Bjork, there was Prince. That’s a very simple encapsulation of my personal pop life.

There is no essence, but there is a flux that is more real than any instance of the flux, such as a milk bottle or a tiger.

If you have suffered from trauma, one of the most healing things that can happen to you is being seen. Being seen doesn’t have to mean that someone actually lays their eyes on you, although that certainly helps.

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

‘Nowness’ is a dynamic relation between the past and the future.

Does anyone recall hippies designing things for Generation X? Does anyone recall the elegance of that? How design was about making things simpler?

If you’re applying for jobs, get a suit now, whether or not you get an interview. Spend as much as you can on it without breaking the bank. It will do you some good.