Ella Maillart Quotes

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

I like delivering a message, but what I find interesting is providing those details in a different context. Then the readers can make up their minds what it means.

All things show up in the world according to the purposes we ascribe to them.

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

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

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots.

The power of a thing or an act is in the meaning and the understanding.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

Everything I think in life is about context and intention.

I don't talk things, sir. I talk the meaning of things.

You know, two people can say exactly the same words, saying the same story, and it would mean something entirely different.

The Text is not a definitive object.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands. The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn’t sound so sensible in short snatches.

Who knew three dots could make such a difference? Like everything else, a love or a wish or whatever, it was all in the way you read it.

Something gets lost when you translate. It's hard to keep straight. Perspective is every thing.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

In the context of eternity, time doesn't matter.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Every single line means something.

In a world of more brilliance words don't mean anything.

You're talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.