Quotes About Subjectivity

Extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. ("Jane Brown's Body")

Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did.

Te concedo que mi manera de sentirla o de entenderla es diferente de la de Babs, y que la realidad de Babs difiere de la de Ossip y así sucesivamente. Pero es como las distintas opiniones sobre la Gioconda o sobre la ensalada de escarola. La realidad está ahí y nosotras en ella, entendiéndola a nuestra manera pero en ella.

There are few things more frustrating than being forced to sit through a bad film with someone who thinks it's a masterpiece.

I know the fashion is that everything is fair game [for comedy material] but I don't believe that.

You have no idea, in short, that what is normal to you is not also universal, that much of what you think of as human nature is only cultural.

People will see whatever they want to see. Parallax.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

A composition that we do not understand or like appears to expand in time as we experience it, yet vanishes almost immediately from memory.

At the beginning these two things, the real and the imaginative life, are one and the same thing, because the infant at the beginning does not perceive objectively, but lives in a subjective state, being the creator of all. Gradually, in health the infant becomes able to perceive a world that is a not-me world, and to attain this state the infant must be cared for well enough at the time of absolute dependence.

It took two hours to drive from Portland to Boston. It felt like two days. We

One of the great challenges of being a modern historian is interviewing multiple people who were all there for something, some event. No one's version matches up 100% with other people's, even if it's three or four people on a conference call.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

I've read a lot of different versions of myself - and all of them are true because it's all opinion, and they're as accurate as it can ever be. But I don't think that I've been deft at hiding parts of my personality.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.

If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know.

When you talk to family and friends, they can't tell you anything from an impartial point of view because they have a vested interest in you.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn't think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful later - and vice versa.

Everything is subjective, right? A question that's easy for you is hard for somebody else, and vice versa.

I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.

I always have a point of view. It may not be right, but it's my own.

All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.