Taylor Caldwell Quotes

People have to find ways of explaining the work.

Whether the person should then be called "an intellectual" seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

I kind of have a Victorian sensibility - I don't understand stuff until I can classify it and name it.

Defining something being a Fleetwood Mac song is calling it a Fleetwood Mac song, you know? Nothing becomes Fleetwood Mac until that's what you call it.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

we expect definitions to tell us not only what is, but what to do about it; to show us how the world fits together and how its different parts connect and work. ... A label is the first step toward action.

A thing named is a thing tamed.

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one's becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.

You are often asked to explain your work, as if the reader isn't able to work it out. And people always try and label you by your work.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title.

Everybody wants to identify things about a poet or about a playwright. They want to codify something or put it in terms that can be understood. We want to understand something, because that's how our minds work. We like to understand things, and it's discomfiting if we don't understand things.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

You explain how it went, and as far as you can figure out how it got that way.

Lady Gaga said to me, 'You showed me how it's done.' I have no idea what she meant by 'it.'

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

The will to label will always prevail over what's being labeled, usually at the expense of either truth or understanding.

I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?

I'm not defining Christians as Jews or Jews as Christians or zebras as elephants.

People are real quick to jump at the easiest way to define you.