Quotes About Subjectivity

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly.

I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me, they are all violent, all separate; and if I fall under the shock of the leap of the moment you will be on me, tearing me to pieces.

Woolf was breaking new ground in the way she rendered consciousness and her understanding of human subjectivity.

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it is liking one felt, or disliking?

When, on a Sunday evening in May 1876, Anna throws herself under the freight train, she has existed more than four years since the beginning of the novel, but in the case of the Lyovins, during the same period, 1872 to 1876, hardly three years have elapsed. It is the best example of relativity in literature that is known to me.

Vladimir Nabokov

reality" (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes)

I could say I think coulds are pretty, and you'd say they're only pretty to demons.

Some scientific] experiments…tell us that what we consider the objective world depends in some measure on our own conscious processes. There is no fixed eternal reality……… true understanding is not to be achieved with the rational mind.

Perversion, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

People don't tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.

La mera verdad es que la verdad no existe, todo depende del punto de vista.

The simple truth is that the truth does not exist; it all depends on a person's point of view.

While it's really hard to do, at the same time, I'm escaping my body, which I really want to do. I'm living someone else's life. I get very intensely into the story, into the interviews and the research. I'm experiencing things along with my subjects. I have a freedom I don't have in my physical life.

because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly

there is nothing more alienating than having one's pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.

on flat affect] ... worlds and events that would have been expected to be captured by expressive suffering—featuring an amplified subjectivity, violent and reparative relationally, and assurance about what makes an event significant—appear with an asterisk of uncertainty.

I didn't say it was dumb. It's what you feel,and guess what?Feelings are like 3yr. olds.They're not rational. They're just there.

An image resists explanation. You relate to it or you do not. You cannot disagree with an image. Through identification with an image you comprehend a totality, rather than learn particular facts.

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

It makes me sad that not every book is good,' I said. 'Not every book can be loved.' 'But when I pull a book off a shelf, and examine it, turning it this way and that, inspecting the cover, flipping through the pages and glancing at the words as they flash by, a thought here and a sentence there and I know that there is potential between those pages for love. Even if in my opinion the book is bad, someone else may find it good. Isn't that like love?

You know when you see a gorgeous boy on the street and you say to your friend, "Look at him!" and then your friend makes a face like, ugly? We all have such totally varied tastes that someone is going to look at you and think, yum-yum dee-lish, no matter what you think you look like. You just have to learn to see what they see.