I’ve been reading the seventeen novels of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish novelist, some set in Vienna during the last years of the Hapsburg Empire. It is in the unimpeachable Efrussi Bank – Roth spells it in the Russian manner – that Trotta deposits his wealth in The Radetzky March.

— Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal Quotes

The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go.

— Edmund de Waal

With languages, you are at home anywhere.

— Edmund de Waal
About Home

There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiralling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. Losing things can something gain you a space in which to live.

— Edmund de Waal

All art is the result of one’s having been in danger of having gone through an experience all the way to the end when no one can go any further. This is what it is like to be an artist – you are unsteady on the edge of life like a swan before an anxious launching of himself on the floods where he is gently caught.

— Edmund de Waal

Even when one is no longer attached to things, it’s still something to have been attached to them; because it was always for reasons which other people didn’t grasp... ′ There are the places in memory you do not wish to go with others.

— Edmund de Waal

And rather impressive – I want to be bourgeois and ask how you find time for five children, a husband and a lover?

— Edmund de Waal

House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces.

— Edmund de Waal

It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.

— Edmund de Waal

Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.

— Edmund de Waal

Does assimilation mean that they never came up against naked prejudice? Does it mean that you understood where the limits of your social world were and you stuck to them?

— Edmund de Waal

I liked the way that repetition wears things smooth, and there was something of the river stone to Iggie’s stories.

— Edmund de Waal

Austrian Republic established after the war gave an amnesty to 90 per cent of members of the Nazi Party in 1948, and to the SS and Gestapo by 1957.

— Edmund de Waal

House-watching is an art. You have to develop a way of seeing how a building sits in its landscape or streetscape. You have to discover how much room it takes up in the world, how much of the world it displaces. Number 81, for instance, is a house that cannily disappears into its neighbours: there are other houses that are grander, some are plainer, but few are more discreet.

— Edmund de Waal

There are things in this world that the children hear, but whose sounds oscillate below an adult’s sense of pitch.

— Edmund de Waal

All these cousins can start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. They need these languages as the family travels to Odessa, to St. Petersburg, to Berlin and Frankfort and Paris. They also need these languages as they are denominators of class. With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home everywhere.

— Edmund de Waal

I’m rather in love with my ‘Vienna as crucible of the twentieth century’ motif, as are many curators and academics.

— Edmund de Waal

I’ve been reading the seventeen novels of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish novelist, some set in Vienna during the last years of the Hapsburg Empire. It is in the unimpeachable Efrussi Bank – Roth spells it in the Russian manner – that Trotta deposits his wealth in The Radetzky March.

— Edmund de Waal

In early December there is a serious meeting in the dressing-room. Elisabeth is to be allowed to choose the style of her own dress for the first time. She has had many dresses made for her before, but this is the first time she is allowed to make the decisions. This is a moment that has been much anticipated by Emmy and Gisela and Iggie, all of whom love clothes, and by Anna, who looks after them.

— Edmund de Waal

Not talking about anti-Semitism was possible; not hearing about it was impossible.

— Edmund de Waal

Charles Joachim Ephrussi had transformed a small grain-trading business into a huge enterprise by cornering the market in buying wheat. He bought the grain from the middlemen who transported it on carts along the heavily rutted roads from the rich black soil of the Ukrainian wheat fields, the greatest wheat fields in the world, into the port of Odessa. Here the grain was stored in his warehouses before being exported across the Black Sea, up the Danube, across the Mediterranean.

— Edmund de Waal
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