Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean.

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

[Making movies] you're not trying to capture reality, you're trying to capture a photograph of reality.

Trying to convey an emotion through words is not easy.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.

It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names.

Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it [life]. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope.

I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

I'm an unashamed realist, and actually, I try to make whatever the script is the reality of that situation, even though it's fictional.

Um, yeah, it's one of the things that you kind of have to accept at the very beginning, like I'm not going to try and be super [deep?] factor and no, I can only do it this way, because that's just not how this film's going to work. Like it's got to be sort of a mesh of reality and complete unreality and you kind of have to accept that and go with it.

I never did like the assertion of the "innate" inferiority or women or Blacks, and I understood that when people tried to talk that way, they were trying to "fix" a social reality into a natural necessity. And yet, sometimes we do need a language that refers to a basic, fundamental, enduring, and necessary dimension of who we are, and the sense of sexed embodiment can be precisely that.

We sift reality through screens composed of ideas . (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language , by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language.

What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to.

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

The reality is that fulfillment, success and all of these good things comes from trying to help those that we care about to achieve those things. How can I help somebody I care about find the job they love? How can I help somebody I care about find happiness in their work? And when we commit to service it actually biologically and anthropologically is more likely to lead to our own success and our own happiness.

I do less-fanciful reality. I celebrate the fat, the ugly, the women who can't get guys. I'm not trying to entertain you; I'm trying to make you passionate.

What really intrigues me is that the totality of all possible Nows of any definite kind has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in the country is a Now.

Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does “life”, but not so mind.

Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

Every author that creates is a liar;literature is a lie,but from that lie, a recreation of reality is born. Therefore, recreating reality is one of the fundaments of creation.

You can't use a drawing to prove a war crime. A drawing doesn't have that notion that it's proof of a reality. Because of that, you can do all sorts of interesting things in it.