Derrick Jensen Quotes

As frightening as this may sound, what you see in the books is the way I see the world. And so far I haven't seen anything, either in Florida or elsewhere, to dissuade me from it.

Both individuals and societies tell themselves stories to simplify and make sense of the messy chaos of reality.

It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits, than to say that our lives and habits depend on our opinions.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

Whoever defines the word, defines the world.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

I don't know if people are born with a worldview or if their thinking is a product of their environment.

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.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

The way we describe our world shows how we think of our world. How we think of our world governs how we interpret our world. How we interpret our world directs how we participate in the world. How we participate in the world shapes the world.

What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.

A good story should change the way you see the world.

A world view is probably an expression of self.

Perhaps looking out through big baby eyes - if we could - would not be as revelatory experience as many imagine. We might see a world inhabited by objects and people, a world infused with causation, agency, and morality - a world that would surprise us not by its freshness but by its familiarity.

When you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

'Darkness' is a subjective word; it depends what your viewpoint is and how you live life.