Life does not consist of choices

"You say that if you had to choose between being a professor at a university and being a farm labourer, you would choose to be a professor. But life does not consist of choices. That is where you keep going wrong. Pablo did not start out as some disincarnate soul given a choice between being king of Spain and being the village idiot. He came to earth, and when he opened his human eyes and looked around, behold, he was in San Juan Obispo, and he was the lowest of the low. Life as a set of problems to be solved; life as a set of choices to be made: what a bizarre way of seeing things!"

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 24-25

Invisibility isn't a quality of the object

"There are no invisible objects of perception," she replies. "Invisibility isn't a quality of the object. It is a quality, a capacity, an incapacity, of the observer. I call the soul invisible if I can't see it. That says something about me. It says nothing about the soul."

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) p.10

When we speak of time

When we speak of time in the everyday sense, what we are referring to is a remarkable interplay of stability and change. In time, the objects of sense do not seem motionless and fixed, but are displayed as encrusted with shifting features. Nonetheless, experience does not decay in each instant into an untethered kaleidoscope of discontinuous sensations; instead, there seem to be sensual objects of greater or lesser durability. Time is the name for this tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities. When we speak instead of space, everyone will recall the old quarrel between Leibniz and Clarke over whether space is an absolute container or simply a matter of relations between things. But in fact it is neither: for space is not just the site of relation, but rather of relation and non-relation. Sitting at the moment in Cairo, I am not entirely without relation to the Japanese city of Osaka, since in principle I could travel there on any given day. But this relation can never be total, since I do not currently touch the city, and even when I travel to stand in the exact center of Osaka I will not exhaust its reality. Whatever sensual profile the city displays to me, even if from close range, this profile will differ from the real Osaka that forever withdraws into the shadows of being. This interplay of relation and non-relation is precisely what we mean when we speak of space, and in this respect Heidegger's tool-analysis is actually about space, not about time as he wrongly contends. Space is the tension between concealed real objects and the sensual qualities associated with them.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) p. 100

The thing as portrayed by the natural sciences

If we weigh and measure a thing, describe its physical properties, or note its objective position in space-time, these qualities hold good for the thing only insofar as it relates to us or to something else. In short, the thing as portrayed by the natural sciences is the thing made dependent on our knowledge, and not in its untamed, subterranean reality.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) pp. 53-54

Something sandy or stony in the human soul

All relations are on exactly the same footing. This does not entail a projection of human properties onto the non-human world, but rather the reverse: what it says is that the crude prehensions made by minerals and dirt are no less relations than are the sophisticated mental activity of humans. Instead of placing souls into sand and stones we find something sandy or stony in the human soul.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) p. 46