Jane Hirshfield Quotes

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

I don't think you really can send an exact message, because any two viewers are so disparate, in terms of their backgrounds, their point of view, their histories, that there's no telling what that message might be.

The words that are coming out of my mouth and how I mean them, it's so much different.

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.

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.

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

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

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

Something's that written out is okay, but it's not always a clear indication of what a person means.

I think it's important for people to always understand what is the context is in what is being said, because that obviously determines what folks are talking about.

The medium is not the message - the message is the message.

Tone is up for grabs in what we do - what's the tone of the scene.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

It’s not what you say; it’s what people hear.

Tone is everything.

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

Yet it was very difficult to separate her interpretation, and keep it distinct from his meaning.

Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.

One of the hardest things in the world is to convey a meaning accurately from one mind to another.

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

Though we have two eyes, we are supplied with but one tongue. Draw your own moral.

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

What is nonsense, and what is not, then, may be merely a matter of perspective.

Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another.

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's.