Sarah Hall Quotes

There's a difference between telling a story and not providing an explanation because you just don't do it well or pull it off.

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.

To define a thing is to substitute the definition for the thing itself.

I have found you an argument; I am not obliged to find you an understanding.

Giving a phenomenon a label does not explain it.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

I feel like if you can describe something fully and accurately, then people will be able to see it themselves - they don't need be told what to.

For my next trick I will make everyone understand me.

Lady Gaga said to me, 'You showed me how it's done.' I have no idea what she meant by 'it.'

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.

Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique.

When other people say, 'Oh you're so-and-so's friend, brother, or husband,' it's reductive to the point of being white noise.

I understand it for marketing purposes, but I've always hated defining myself with a genre. Nothing feels broad enough.

I'm kind of used to people trying to define me or, you know, lying about me.

They always like to put labels on me.

I don't feel it incumbent on me to make sense of everything.

If I wanted you to understand it, I would have explained it better.

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined.

My experience is that I find myself having to constantly define myself to others, day-in, day-out. The quote that's helped me the most through that is from Toni Morrison's "Beloved" where she says, "Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined" - so I find myself defining myself for other people lest I be defined by others and stuck into some box where I don't particularly belong.

It's a weird feeling when people are defining you, and you haven't even defined yourself.

Understanding sometimes is not enough to explain something.

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

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

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.

Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.