Artifact Quotes

1. "A girl?" Her mother looked at her, curiously, as if the word were unknown to her; ancient and puzzling as an artifact behind a glass encasement."
Author: Abby Slovin

2. "After all, much of the fondness avid readers, and certainly collectors, have for their books is related to the books' physical bodies. As much as they are vessels for stories (and poetry, reference information, etc.), books are historical artifacts and repositories for memories-we like to recall who gave books to us, where we were when we read them, how old we were, and so on."
Author: Allison Hoover Bartlett

3. "Our interpreting the universe as an artifact absolutely requires that we posit an author for it, or a celestial fimmaker, dramatist, painter, sculptor, composer, architect, or choreographer. And no one has been willing openly to posit such an artist for the universe since the American transcedentalists and before them the Medieval European philosophers."
Author: Annie Dillard

4. "I find greater companionship in inert figures, animals & speechless artifacts, for I can enjoy their presence & there is no psychic drain"
Author: Anton Szandor LaVey

5. "But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before."
Author: Bob Edwards

6. "I have sought to offer humanists a detailed analysis of a technology sufficiently magnificent and spiritual to convince them that the machines by which they are surrounded are cultural artifacts worthy of their attention and respect."
Author: Bruno Latour

7. "If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

9. "Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God—especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side—is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact."
Author: David Bentley Hart

10. "I'm lying on a Star Wars bedspread," said a dry voice behind them, "Will I ever be able to look myself in the eye again?" They all turned. "By the fact that I'm not on Rashah," Ronan said, looking about him, "but instead apparently in suburban hell, and in contact with this dubious cultural artifact, I take it we won?"
Author: Diane Duane

11. "If we could stop thinking of 'meaning' and 'purpose' as artifacts of some divine creative act and see them instead as the yield of our own creative future, they become goals, intentions and processes very much in reach rather than the shadows of childlike, superstitious mythology."
Author: Douglas Rushkoff

12. "Gifted teachers master the patience required for the unending business of transmitting civilization down the generations, transforming biological facts – children – into social artifacts called citizens. It is wearying work and it is a wonder teachers can summon the stamina for it."
Author: George F. Will

13. "A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand."
Author: Geraldine Brooks

14. "Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience."
Author: Jaron Lanier

15. "Not your weapons," Agrona sneered. "Your artifacts. Sigyn's bow. The Horn of Roland. The Swords of Ruslan. And, of course, Vic.""Well, naturally," the sword crowed, his voice swelling with pride. "I do put the art in artefact."I looked down on him. "Really?" I whispered. "You're really going to talk about how awesome you are at a time like this?""Certainly," Vic said. "Why wouldn't I?"
Author: Jennifer Estep

16. "Erhaps it was the difference in age between the countries—America with its expansive youth, building all those drive-in movie theaters and cowboy restaurants; Italians living in endless contraction, in the artifacts of generations, in the bones of empires."
Author: Jess Walter

17. "When she had packed all the artifacts that made up their personal history into liquor store boxes, the house became strictly a feminine place. She stood with her hands on her hips, stoically accepting the absence of old Boston Celtics coasters and the tangle of fishing poles, the old dartboard from a Scots pub, the toolbox and downhill skis, the silky patterned ties which sat in the base of one box like a writing mass of snakes. Without these things, one tended to notice the bright eyelet curtains, the vase filled with yawning crocuses, a needlepoint pillow ... Overall, the house looked much like her apartment had eight years ago, before she had met him."
Author: Jodi Picoult

18. "We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions."
Author: John Searle

19. "In the end, like the Almighty Himself, we make everything in our image, for want of a more reliable model; our artifacts tell more about ourselves than our confessions."
Author: Joseph Brodsky

20. "My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft."
Author: Julia Glass

21. "The spectacle shop was old, long, and narrow, with a glass front and a small thin door that opened onto a somewhat busy avenue in the antiques district on the South side of Lovat. It was a quiet enough area, away from the rougher warrens, but not particularly elevated. Across the cramped street hawkers sold vases, while up the road outside a rug merchant's shop a man sold antique suits. There was also Dubois' new storefront to the East; he dealt in religious artifacts and trinkets. The shopkeep hadn't liked when he had moved in; it had somehow changed the feel of the warren. Odd folks had started showing up shortly after Saint Olmstead Religious Antiques opened: black-clad priests, Hasturians in yellow robes, and a few Deeper cultists dressed in their gray sackcloth rags. It had set the entire warren on edge."
Author: K. M. Alexander

22. "Chloe-lass:If I'm not here with you now, I'm beyond this life, for 'tis the only way I'll ever let you go....I hoped I loved you well, sweet, for I know even now that you are my brightest shining star. I knew it the moment I saw you. Ah, lass, you so adore your artifacts. This thief covets but one priceless treasure: You.Dageus-In a letter"
Author: Karen Marie Moning

23. "She smiled radiantly at the shield, pretending it was Dageus. The three simple words just didn't seem like enough. Love was so much larger than words."I love you, I love you, I love you. I love you more than chocolate. I love you more than the whole world is big." She paused, thinking, searching for a way to explain what she felt. "I love you more than artifacts. I love you so much it makes my toes curl just thinking about it."Pushing her hair back from her face, she donned her most sincere expression. "I love you.""You can have the confounded shield if you love it that much, lass," Dageus said, sounding utterly bewildered. Chloe felt all the blood drain from her face."
Author: Karen Marie Moning

24. "Oh, for heaven's sake, she thought with droll exasperation, this certainly explains a lot. It's no wonder I haven't been able to keep my hands off the blasted man since the day I met him. He's an artifact! A Celtic one at that!"
Author: Karen Marie Moning

25. "Like most young Annawadians, the girls considered the caste obsession of their elders to be an irrelevant artifact. Manju and Meena had become friends because they both loved to dance, and stayed friends because they could keep each other's secrets."
Author: Katherine Boo

26. "I am also really into religious artifacts."
Author: Kathleen Robertson

27. "Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play."
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

28. "You are pure-hearted, Branza, and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart. However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam's imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive. Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to. (357)"
Author: Margo Lanagan

29. "I expect to see the coming decades transform the planet into an art form; the new man, linked in a cosmic harmony that transcends time and space, will sensuously caress and mold and pattern every facet of the terrestrial artifact as if it were a work of art, and man himself will become an organic art form. There is a long road ahead, and the stars are only way stations, but we have begun the journey. To be born in this age is a precious gift, and I regret the prospect of my own death only because I will leave so many pages of man's destiny — if you will excuse the Gutenbergian image — tantalizingly unread. But perhaps, as I've tried to demonstrate in my examination of the postliterate culture, the story begins only when the book closes."
Author: Marshall McLuhan

30. "If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms - if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body - it's because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what's inside and what's outside was much less. It's not that we've forgotten the language of gestures entirely. The habit of moving our hands while we speak is left over from it. Clapping, pointing, giving the thumbs up : all artifacts of ancient gestures. Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together. And at night, when it's too dark to see, we find it necessary to gesture on each other's body to make ourselves understood."
Author: Nicole Krauss

31. "An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real -- it is a passing will o' the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts"
Author: Nigel Hey

32. "It is one of those lessons that every child should learn: Don't play with fire, sharp objects, or ancient artifacts."
Author: Patricia Briggs

33. "Yes, the island is still there. Yes, we found Nick and Daisy and can bring them here. Yes, The Eye has put a price on Archer's head that could buy a small island."That last bit Archer had taken pretty hard. Apparently, his little squad of Eyes had gone back to tell their boss lady that Archer had used some kind of magical artifact to put a compulsion spell on them. That was the only reason they'd fought for Prodigium."Is that true?" I'd asked Archer. His eyes had slid away from mine, and he'd given an exaggerated shrug.I took that as a yes."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

34. "Okay, well, that sucks. But, Soph, guess what I saw today."I flopped across my mattress, toeing my sneakers off. "We're on a cursed island surrounded by killer fog, and ruled by two crazy-ass witches. I really can't begin to guess, Jen.""Lara, coming out of the cellar," she said, blowing her pink stripe off her forehead. "And looking super secretive and suspicious. Well, I mean, more super secretive and suspicious than usual."Ah, the cellar. A dank, creepy place full of magical artifacts that had a tendency to move around. Archer and I had spent an awful lot of quality time down there last year."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

35. "The rest of the guardians are all checking out the explosion," I realised. Pieces began coming together-including Lissa's lack of surprise over the commotion. "Oh no. You had Christian blow up ancient Moroi artifacts." "Of course not," said Eddie. He seemed shocked that I would have suggested such an atrocity. "Other fire users would be able to tell if he did." "Well, that's something," I said. I should have had more faith in their sanity. Or maybe not. "We used C4," explained Mikhail. "Where on earth did you-"
Author: Richelle Mead

36. "So if you go to a King Tut exhibit someday and notice cracks or burn marks on the artifacts, or maybe a statue with its head glued on backward-well, sorry. that was probably our fault"
Author: Serpent's Shadow Rick Riordan

37. "Some, in an effort to protect and preserve the gospel message, have become like the guards in that museum, fueled by fear that it could be damaged or stolen if they are not vigilant in their watch. They have mistaken the good news for an ancient artifact that needs to be protected. But that is not its nature. This kingdom is a lot more like a tree. God is looking for gardeners, not guards. A guard is trained in a defensive stance of fear and suspicion. A gardener is motivated by love and creativity."
Author: Shane Hipps

38. "I'm sure he just wanted to touch a piece of home. Hell, whatever artifact he took probably belonged to him or some member of his family. I'm not going to kill anyone because he was homesick, Artie – kind of like killing someone when he's on the can. It's just wrong. (Acheron)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

39. "Now, relational artifacts pose these questions directly."
Author: Sherry Turkle

40. "The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we'renot the first to die."
Author: Simon Van Booy

41. "LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself."
Author: Stanislav Grof

42. "Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up."
Author: Stephen King

43. "I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that's what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn't just live together--they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they'd collected along the way."
Author: T.C. Boyle

44. "History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness."
Author: Terence McKenna

45. "Master Stuart made his letters into paper darts and launched them page by page from the roof of the house-watching them descend and fade into the green ravine below...Some he saved to trade at school for other artifacts of war sent home by other elder brothers like his own-but only the letters mailed from France were worthy of this exchange. They had to have the smell of fire."
Author: Timothy Findley

46. "Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us."
Author: Timothy Keller

47. "The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book."(Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, Harper's Magazine, February 2008)"
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

48. "The dialectical or ecological approach asserts that creating the world is involved in our every act. It is impossible for us to operate in our daily lives and not create the world that everyone must live in. What we desire arranges the genetic code in all of our major crops and livestock. We cannot avoid participating in the creation, and it is in agriculture, far and away our largest and most basic artifact, that human culture and the creation totally interpenetrate."
Author: Wes Jackson

49. "Few things contain and impact the immediacy of cultural impress so evocatively as books, and not only through their ideas. A book is an artifact, and every age establishes upon the basic functional structure its own particular stamp."
Author: William Everson

50. "Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole."
Author: William S. Burroughs

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