Quotes About Subjectivity

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

I have never experienced racism in the feminist movement, so it concerned me to think that I was unable to see the subject clearly because I came from white, middle-class privilege.

I'm always more attracted to the unattractive.

If we're reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It's unavoidable.

During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.

I'm never a reliable narrator, unbiased or objective.

The world is nothing but my perception of it. I see only through myself. I hear only through the filter of my story.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

There's no right. There's no wrong. There's only popular opinion.

One man's justice is another's injustice; one man's beauty another's ugliness; one man's wisdom anpther's folly.

It is the subjective world that rules the objective. Change the subject, and the object is bound to change; purify yourself, and the world is bound to be purified.

There was a stump of a tree, and in the dark, a thief came that way and said, "That is a policeman." A young man waiting for his beloved saw it and thought that it was his sweetheart. A child who had been told ghost stories took it for a ghost and began to shriek. But all the time it was the stump of a tree. We see the world as we are. Do

But if "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder, so is "obscenity.

Nothing has meaning except for the meaning you give it.

Modernism had two great wishes. It wanted its audience to be led toward a recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

We never know the quality of someone else's life, though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.

Even a crow thinks its child is golden.

It's lovely. I hate it.

To her lover a beautiful woman is a delight; / To a monk she's a distraction; / To a mosquito, a good meal. It makes the point well: how things seem depends on the lens or filter through which we look at them.

Emotions add the qualities of pleasantness or unpleasantness to what the mind perceives.

A pithy Zen aphorism goes like this: To her lover a beautiful woman is a delight; / To a monk she's a distraction; / To a mosquito, a good meal. It makes the point well: how things seem depends on the lens or filter through which we look at them.

Time — how it expands to fill the spaces you create; how it makes meagre experiences seem never-ending. Whenever he heard people talk about the ravages of time, about how it robbed and deprived, Justin always smiled; because for him, time was an accomplice, plugging the gaps and fleshing out morsels of memory so he would have something substantial to hang on to. That way, however little he had seen or felt, he would always feel as if he had more: a life far richer than the truth.