Edmund de Waal Quotes

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.

With languages, you are at home anywhere

Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.