Stacy Schiff Quotes

Weigh the meaning and look not at the words.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

I wanted to make connections between Whale's past and present.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

I can see now that a concept or even a feeling makes no sense unless out of our substance we spin around it a web of references, of relationships, of values.

Everything's connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it.

For me, I want to find the truth in the word and the character and the line.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

That's what politics is. It's the story of what's happening, what does it mean, what's the conclusion, who are the interesting characters?

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

Charlie X”)? Those were the hints, as far as I’m concerned.

The information was correct but the interpretations were not.

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.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

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

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.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.