"Still on the subject of eating, we don't have our own plates, or our own knives and forks or cups.  Like most of what we use, they're communal, they're handed out at random.  There's no chance for anything to become imbued, to come alive through fondness.  Nothing here is aware, no chair, no cup.  Nobody can get fond of anything.

At home I walked through a haze of belongings that knew, at least vaguely, who they belonged to.  Grampar's chair resented anyone else sitting on it as much as he did himself.  Gramma's shirts and jumpers adjusted themselves to hide her missing breast.  My mother's shoes positively vibrated with consciousness.  Our toys looked out for us.  There was a potato knife in the kitchen that Gramma couldn't use.  It was an ordinary enough brown-handled thing, but she'd cut herself with it once, and ever after it wanted more of her blood.  If I rummaged through the kitchen drawer, I could feel it brooding.  After she died, that faded.  Then there were the coffee spoons, rarely used, tiny, a wedding present.  They were made of silver, and they knew themselves superior to everything else and special.

None of these things did anything.  The coffee spoons didn't stir the coffee without being held or anything.  They didn't have conversations with the sugar tongs about who was the most cherished.  (We always felt they might at any moment.)  I suppose what they really did was psychological.  They confirmed the past, they connected everything, they were threads in a tapestry.  Here there is no tapestry, we jangle about separately."
-Among Others by Jo Walton