“This is the strange undoing of a collection, of a house and of a family. It is the moment of fissure when grand things are taken and when family objects, known and handled and loved, become stuff.” — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“I do not know where Viktor and Rudolf were taken. I cannot find the records. I never Elisabeth or Iggie. It is possible that they were taken to the Hotel Metropole, which has been sequestered as the headquarters of the Gestapo. There are many other lock-ups for this flood of Jews. They are beaten, of course; but they are also… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share
“And I'm not entitled to nostalgia about all that lost wealth and glamour from a century ago. And I am not interested in thin.… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“And someone turns out the lights in the library, as if being in the dark will make them invisible, but the noise reaches into… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“The house wasn't theirs anymore. It was full of people, some in uniforms and some in suits. People counting rooms, making lists of objects and pictures, taking things away. Anna is in there somewhere. She has been ordered to help with this packing-up into boxes and crates, told that she should be ashamed of working for the Jews. And it… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share
“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… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share
“There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiraling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share
“He stands with his hands in his pockets, well-dressed and self-assured, with his life before him and a plush armchair behind him.” — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“You just hope, if you make things as I do, that they can make their way in the world and have some longevity.” — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“Stories and objects share something, a patina...Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed...But it also seems additive,… — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“Kövecses radiated the sense of self-sufficiency that comes about when there are lots of children in a big house.” — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
“The vitrines exist so that you can see objects, but not touch them: they frame things, suspend them, tantalise through distance.” — Edmund de Waal Copy Share Image
