Language originates from the mouth. It comes from within, obeying the speed of the body, the dexterity of hand and the formation of the palette. But whereas the voice, the organic form of language, has the power to connect bodies at the site of their juncture with the outside world – ears and mouth – language as an abstract and totalising system enacts a kind of conceptual violence apart from the body. Far from being the primary grid of things, the nominalist fantasy, language is revealed as a historical construct coherent only with the density of its own past.

Neville Wakefield, 'Ann Hamilton: between words and things' in Mneme (Tate Gallery Publications, 1994) p. 25

In normal contexts the room, the simplest form of shelter, expresses the most benign potential of human life. It is, on the one hand, an enlargement of the body: it keeps warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within; like the body its walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world yet in in its windows and doors, crude versions of the senses, it enables the self to move into that world and allows the world to enter.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985) p. 38

'Inevitable Progress!' he repeated. 'Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are – there we are in the Golden Future. But needless to say, in the very nature of things, the future can't be golden. For the simple reason that nobody ever gets anything for nothing. Massacre always has to be paid for, and its price is a state of things that absolutely guarantees you against achieving the good which the massacre was intended to achieve. And the same is true even of bloodless revolutions. Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards. Backwards and downwards,' he repeated; and, taking the cigar out of his mouth, he threw back his head and gave vent to a long peal if wheezy laughter.

Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have A Stop (Triad/Panther, 1982) pp. 128-129

Think about the possibility of the work of art shifting allegiance – embodying rather than representing the cyclical, embracing labor, biology, mortality, change, process; becoming more deeply part of the mutable world rather than a monument on its banks. Reconnect the act of making to its sister acts of laboring, consuming, attending, the acts that make the world, over and over again. Shift from the new to the renewed; recognize the world has no lack of things, only of attending to things; shift then from production to maintenance.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 50

As money is not the measure of money but all else, so humanity is not the measure of itself but something that is measured and measures everything else.

Rebecca Solnit, 'Landscapes of Emergency' in Ann Hamilton (University of Washington, 1992) p. 49