Quotes About Subjectivity

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. (pg. 174)

It is simply up to the individual to decide what "the One" is: how it should be defined, and how it should be experienced

those doughnuts are a lot better than having a mule kick you in the head, There was no argument there.

There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.

You say you have experienced God directly? Well, some people have experienced a pink elephant, but that probably doesn't impress you.

An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.

Many people believe in God because they believe they have seen a vision of him – or of an angel or a virgin in blue – with their own eyes. Or he speaks to them inside their heads. This argument from personal experience is the one that is most convincing to those who claim to have had one. But it is the least convincing to anyone else, and anyone knowledgeable about psychology.

One man's feeling is not always equal to all that life is. Sometimes it's not equal to anything much at all.

They felt their own judgements absolute and the judgements of others idiocy or wickedness deserving the worst punishment. It was as if everyone had to believe their own story—any story, really—because if they stopped believing there would only be reality left to deal with. No one doubted, or was unsure; every individual was infallible because it was their truth, and so there could be no truth and the world was wrong.

I tried to write what I remembered of the day. It sounded terrible and noble all at once. But it wasn't any of those things.

Make it personal.

We are so bemused by our own petard, that we are unable to look at things objectively.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened—when these new memories suddenly came upon me—it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.

If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left.

This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.

what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as petite and unopinionated. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes short and bossy.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine. Perhaps this is an illusion all lovers have about themselves: that they escape both category and description.

We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what 'really' happened.

Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.