Jane Roberts Quotes

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Therefore, when we arrive in a place and talk to new people about a new image, it is very hard for them to visualize it. That's where the drawings are very important, because at least we can show a projection of what we believe it will look like.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

Symbols are important.

The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.

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.

Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.

What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.

The description is not the described.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

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?

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.