Quotes About Representation

They seemed to dispense with the need to represent space in the interests of directly manifesting it.

This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.

A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader.

We need to keep in mind the distinction between realism and reality. To confuse the two is to lose sight of the difference between art and life.

The desire to replicate the—or a—viewer's view is realism's reason for being.

I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It's an illusion that I - I personally - really exist; I'm just representative of a type.

Do you believe Shakespeare's Shylock and Dickens's Fagin have been of no use to anti-Semites?

With all due respect to this court, we've had to deal with so many other monkeys in so many other courtrooms, we felt it was only appropriate to bring in our own, so we could compete on equal terms.

For the chronically illiterate, a photo-op is worth much, much more than a thousand words.

Once more, we will have a government of, by and for the people.

ineffable , adj . these words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations words cannot convoy. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

Picture me however you want to picture me. Because odds are that'll be more true than any of the bodies you see me in.

Intentar escribir sobre el amor es, en última instancia, lo mismo que intentar que un diccionario represente la vida. No importa cuántas palabras contenga, nunca serán suficientes.

Why try to angle together the wall souvenirs of our new-to-New-York lives, when we could invent new hieroglyphs to represent us?

Because thoughts about ethnoracial groups have a deep resonance with thoughts about biological species, people's minds naturally turn to thoughts about the latter when they want to denigrate the former. Because derogatory thoughts are the driving force, hated or despised species are unconsciously selected to represent them.

Matisse, consultado sobre la piel verde: No estoy pintando una mujer. Estoy pintando un cuadro.

Every page is a bent version of reality—too unsophisticated to be art but too self-conscious to be mere reportage.

La izquierda, desde que asumió la representación del puritanismo, se lo puso muy fácil a sus rivales. Ellos mismos meten la cabeza en la boca de un león que los devora, porque nadie es capaz de sostener esa moralidad impostada que predican.

In the 1880s, though, Douglass's fame still had to be couched in the racialized claim that he represented "the one, and apparently only one, exception to the general laziness and ignorance of the black population in the midst of which he was born.

feminist Abby Kelley to the executive committee by a tally of 557 to 451.

I once overheard a young white man at a book festival say to his friend, "Have you read the new Kureishi? Same old thing—loads of Indian people." To which you want to reply, "Have you read the new Franzen? Same old thing—loads of white people.

because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black women who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book.

These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston's own grain. She saw things otherwise: "When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!" This is exactly right. No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora—of whatever color or background or gender.

Be completely fearless. [...]Write without constraints, or worrying about who you represent, or whether you should represent anyone, or who your audience is, or what you can or can't do with a female character, or a black character, or someone of restricted growth, or someone who's hugely fat. You must write total confidence that the fiction is its own justification.