Pottery Quotes

“Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”

“There’s got to be some scientific study somewhere that proves your boyfriend’s sweater will keep you warmer and cure you of any illnesses a lot faster, than some Pottery Barn blanket.”

“On the Italian side, we can trace the family back 2,000 years. I have a cousin in Rome, a famous archaeologist, Count Andrea Carandini, who was in Lombardy and came across some pottery with the original name of the family, Carandinus, painted on it.”

“New York had pushed and bent and bullied, driving me underground to sort out the madness and sculpt my Being with my own hands in self-discovery on its cold pottery wheel and in the white heat of its kiln. The City enabled me to learn who I really was, as a pixelated man and member of Humanity.”

“He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.”

“Tedious as it may appear to some to dwell on the discovery of odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away by the owner as rubbish ... yet it is by the study of such trivial details that Archaeology is mainly dependent for determining the date of earthworks. ... Next to coins fragments of pottery afford the most reliable of all evidence ...”

“Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it's been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.”

“My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.”

“Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called “a mystery ashtray,” which got hurled back into the clay bucket. So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.”