Georgia O'Keeffe Quotes

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

What we perceive things to be when they come out of our mouth is not what the listener perceives it to be. They think it differently. They're not your blood. They're not your mind. You get in an argument.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

The problem I have with making an intelligent statement is that some people then think it's not an isolated occurrence.

I don't like making comparisons. You might say one slight thing, find yourself misinterpreted, and suddenly you're in trouble.

I think I get misinterpreted and misunderstood a lot.

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself. I was also blurrier.

Here’s how a child listens: you tell him something, and he puts his own interpretation on what you said. That’s what he hears. No one has ever heard you.

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear.

Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.

He that is warme, thinkes all so.

Whoever thought that he had understood something of me had merely construed something out of me, after his own image.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Derek Jeter used to come to me and try to tell you what Joe Torre is all about, he's a good man, he's this, he's that, but like I tell Derek Jeter, that's you. It's one thing that they treat you a certain way; you don't feel what other people feel.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

The problem is that perception is reality.

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is.

It's presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.

I want to suggest a feeling. It's ridiculous to assume you can state an opinion. Somebody else can never relate to the lyric in the same way because their whole experience is different. You can only suggest, then people add their own history and experience to the lyrics.