Quotes About Context

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our tendency to see everything in the dark glass of our own era, with all its blind spots, motes, beams, and distortions.

I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accidents. First, I am inspired by the acts of potential collaborators. It tends to be an action they have already done in a different context. I am very clear about the rules of the game, but once it's launched, I don't intervene at all.

It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.

The idea of 'advice,' in terms of telling people advice or asking people for advice, has become not comprehensible to me, to a certain degree, due to feeling, like, for something to be accurately defined as 'good' or 'bad,' I would want to know the context, goal, perspective for it.

I'm thinking in terms of a point of departure, a field of action for performers to express an expressive need of mine which hopefully the context of music would convey.

When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue; you look for somebody who knows the terrain. It's about context.

For me, comedy literally is way more terrifying than doing drama, so it's always about stretching what I think I can do and putting myself out there in different context.

The Senkaku Islands are an integral part of Japanese territory based on international law as well as in the context of our history.

I'm not a luddite. Science, computers, medicine, they're all great. But nature is context. That which we can't control. Its constant mortality and immortality is an answer to the terror of finite existence. It reassures the soul.

After 9/11, we did see Palestinian terrorism in the context of all terrorism.

It has the funny kind of incomplete, semiabstract reality that scripts or scores have—they are programs, as it were, for real things in the world (the produced play, the performed music) that require adding a context, and decisions about that context affect the whole of the abstract object.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

But to worship at the altar of "just read" fails to see reading for what it actually is: a complex and nuanced interplay of decoding, vocabulary, subject matter, and contextual knowledge. Well-intended but misguided teachers and administrators have imposed a kind of illiteracy on low-income children of color by focusing their attention relentlessly in the mirror, instead of out the window. Reading comprehension is not a skill you teach but a condition you create.

Many people do not yet realize it, but the modern car is as much a contextual tool as a smart phone is—only a lot bigger.

Without location, there is no context." And for Apple, without context there will be no leadership.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox.

The most fundamental of context effects is the principle of contrast. The principle relies on the fact that human minds magnify differences: when two relatively similar stimuli are placed next to each other, they'll be perceived as more different from each other than they actually are. Contrast is not only the most basic of context effects but probably the easiest to achieve. "I don't paint things," Matisse said. "I only paint the difference between things.

The human brain is wired to see relationships, not detached elements. The artist Heinz Kusel, who taught color theory for twenty years, explained: "Color by itself doesn't exist. All that we see as color is created by relationships-what the color is next to, what surrounds it. A name for a color is absurd, because its appearance is constantly changing as a result of its environment. There are no fixed colors. In a different context it's changed completely."2

For the first few miles the highway ran through a little valley dotted with rocks that seemed to have fallen from the sky. Chunks of granite with no origin or context.

Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.

You must not judge too quickly, he said quietly. Each man deserves to be judged against the canvas of his time and his country.

Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The