…I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background…curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention.

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Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, p.38.

We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things–of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars and bird-pecked apples and the scents rising from the soil–seems odd and somewhat misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing.

David Abram, Becoming Animal, p.6

Collage, the art of assembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.

Charles Simic, Dime-Store-Alchemy, quoted as #44 in Reality Hunger by David Shields

…I realized that the swing in the back yard made me think of a set—a stage or perhaps a TV set but we didn’t get a TV until I was 11 years old—anyway, I wanted to put on a show. I didn’t know what kind of show but I knew the area needed it. For some reason it was not complete in itself. I needed to comment on it. It has something to do with time and death—the swing being there then was not enough.

From The Journals of Spalding Gray, edited by Nell Casey (January 6, 1968 entry, p.17).

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

Opening sentence of Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Street Haunting.”