Like all other creatures, human beings do not exist on the ‘other side’ of materiality but swim in an ocean of materials. Once we acknowledge our immersion, what this ocean reveals to us is not the bland homogeneity of different shades of matter but a flux in which materials of the most diverse kinds – through processes of admixture and distillation, of coagulation and dispersal, and of evaporation and precipitation – undergo continual generation and transformation. 

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(Ingold, Tim, Materiality and Materials)

We think to find ourselves we need to turn inward, examining the intricacies of origin, the shaping forces of personality.  But ‘I’ is just as much to be found in the world; looking outward, we experience the one who does the seeing.  Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing.  

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(Doty, Mark, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon)

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heart beat and we should die of that raw which lies on the other side of silence.  As it is the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity. 

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(Elliot, George, Middlemarch)

Each poem, each piece remembers us perfectly, 

the way the earth remembers our bodies,

the way man and woman in their joining

remember each other before they were separate.

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(Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges, Miners Pond)

The most beautiful still lives are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets.  The lemon has been half-peeled, the wine tasted...Someone has left this knife resting on the edge of a plate, its handle jutting toward us; someone plans, in a moment, to pick it up again.  These objects are in use, in dialogue, a part of, implicated.  They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time.  

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(Doty, Mark, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon)