““I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing in itself. Not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger. As if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored, there was contained the secret of my own regeneration. Living in the midst of a world where there was a plethora of the new, I attached myself to the old. In every object there was a minute particle which particularly claimed my attention. I had a microscopic eye for the blemish, for the grain of ugliness, which to me constituted the sole beauty of the object. Whatever set the object apart, or made it unserviceable, or gave it a date, endeared it to me.””
![“That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society.” quote by Edward Gibbon](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/70c/edward-gibbon-710_barbarism_that-country-carthage-was-rapidly-sinkin_393.jpg)
