David Eddings Quotes

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

I used to believe in signs, omens, patterns, secret purpose, synchronicities.

All things make sense; you just have to fathom how they make sense.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

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

Interpretation blocks reception while masquerading as reception. Rightness does not need interpretation; it requires simple acceptance and nothing else.

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.

I always interpret coincidences as little clues to our destiny

Memphis—it’s just a bird. Birds fly around, brother. It’s what they do. It’s not following you, and it’s not a sign. Unless you really did give it candy and flowers, in which case you are one strange brother.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

What signs fail to express, their application shows. What signs slur over, their application says clearly.

Everyone has to understand what we're saying to one another and there's no point in me thinking the line means this and the person I'm speaking to thinks it means something else. So there's a certain amount of analyzing of text that's of course necessary.

Fact explains nothing. On the contrary, it is fact that requires explanation.

You have to really know what you're saying.

I'm real clear, you know? There's no fogginess.

To know much is often the cause of doubting more.

No time for poetry but exactly what is.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

All lyrical work must, as a whole, be perfectly intelligible, but in some particulars a little unintelligible.

If we are ready to tolerate everything as understood, there is nothing left to explain; while if we sourly refuse to take anything, even tentatively, as clear, no explanation can be given.

Clean, quick, and easy as lying. We know how it ends practically before it starts. That's why stories appeal to us. They give is the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

Every science in a certain degree starts from faith, and, on the contrary, faith, which does not lead to science, is mistaken faith or superstition, but real, genuine faith it is not.