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Edmund de Waal Quotes

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

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

Edmund de Waal
Travel, Moving, Home
Edmund de Waal (2010). “The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance”, p.22, Random House

With languages, you are at home anywhere

Edmund de Waal
Home, Language
Edmund de Waal (2010). “The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance”, p.22, Random House

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

Edmund de Waal
Let It Go, Generations, Problem

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.

Edmund de Waal
Memories, Two, Rivers

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