George Eliot Quotes

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

Something that's interesting is how my perspective on different events can change over time even though the events themselves haven't changed. As I get older, I interpret something differently, or I can even interpret a person differently.

Each day, as you get older, there is a new perspective on life. It's a progression of some sort.

It really doesn't matter if it happened exactly how I say it happened.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

The facts, even the real ones, must be imagined before they can be stated.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

It's the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It's all only frames from which the content rises.

When you add a period of 25 years between the playing and the listening, then the whole question of meaning gets very complicated.

At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

You have to think not about what you mean but about what people hear.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them.

A childhood is what anyone wants to remember of it. It leaves behind no fossils, except perhaps in fiction.

She was surprised at how tiny it seemed now. She supposed the school was just as big as it had ever been only her eyes had grown used to looking at bigger things.

How does it happen that something that makes so much sense in the moonlight doesn't make any sense at all in the sunlight?

Because you have seen something doesn't mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society are almost without limit. The possibilities make good scientists chary.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.