Labour as aesthetic strategy is an attempt to experience the suffering of others, to demonstrate the impossibility of remaining outside what one critiques, and yet, at the same time, when deploying it in something so 'useless' as this empty artwork, attempting to defeat capitalism.

Mieke Bal, 'Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut' in Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (Tate Publishing, 2007) p. 60

Every built structure (to paraphrase Virilio) is the possibility of a new disaster. To build is thus also to construct infinite lines of destruction.

Eyal Weizman, 'Seismic Archaeology' in Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (Tate Publishing, 2007) p. 33

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. [...] It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped, like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the objects reeling us back in time, undoing each loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. Instead, most of the objects form the secret constellations of our irrecoverable past, returning only in dreams where nothing but the dreamer is lost.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) pp. 185-186

The terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it's awareness of knowledge's limits. [...] To acknowledge the unknown is part of knowledge, and the unknown is visible as terra incognita but invisible as selection.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) p. 163

Perhaps it's that you can't go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) p. 117

Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide To Getting Lost (Canongate, 2006) p. 23

Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound...

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Faber and Faber Limited, 2000) p. 116

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don't go on for ever. It must have been shattering – stamped into one's memory. And yet I can't remember it. It never occurred to me at all. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, before we know that there are words, out we come, bloodied and squalling with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Faber and Faber Limited, 2000) p. 63

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Picador, 2007) p. 139

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Picador, 2007) p. 56

Art is short, life is long.

Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (Penguin Books, 2001) p. 73

Skyscrapers and semi-detached houses alike, roads and railway lines, will be reduced to sand and pebbles, and strewn as glistening and barely recognizable relics along the shoreline of the future.

Jan Zalasiewicz, The Earth After Us (Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 81

He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?
There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis form infancy through maturity to decay.

Why did he desist from speculation?
Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other more acceptable phenomena in place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed.

Did Stephen participate in his dejection?
He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to  the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void.

James Joyce, Ulysses (Penguin Books, 1969) p. 618