Humphrey Carpenter Quotes

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

The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

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?

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

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

That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were truths and they were all beautiful.

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

Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her.

The fact is one thing and the idea about the fact is another.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.

You can never be sure whether you are discovering the truth or inventing it.

There's truths there that spiral out of what appears to be just a word game. That's what I find mystifying about the meanings of things: they kind of unscrew themselves from the practical words.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.

The description is not the described.

Letters are things, not pictures of things.

Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That's what lies do.

Reality is only just a word.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.