The only difference between a flower and a weed is judgement.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.
I chose to camouflage my body into the environment because this way, people will pay more attention to the background's social property, and the meaning of my body disappeared in this environment as an individual.
Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.
A vest, as a clothing item, always makes a statement, but depending on context, those declarations vary a great deal.
I don't think something necessarily has to be mean or cynical to represent 'edgy.' I think 'edgy' can mean a lot of different things.
It is a fine line between making fun of the right thing and making fun of the wrong thing. And the language oftentimes is the same.
Well, I know, after all, it is only juxtaposition, Juxtaposition, in short; and what is juxtaposition?
When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.
The moral of a fable is eternal. The moral of a story is temporary to a story.
The point of quotations is that one can use another's words to be insulting.
Do remember that one line does nothing; it is only in relation to another that it creates a volume.
Your words and my words are the same, but not our meaning.
In Indonesia democracy meant what ever you wanted it to mean, whenever you wanted to mean it.
Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.
Our words are, as a general rule, filled by the people to whom we address them with a meaning which those people derive from their own substance, a meaning widely different from that which we had put into the same words when we uttered them.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living thought and may vary in color and context according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.
Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.
Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
The Bible, of course, is not a theology book. It is certainly not a philosophy book. So we have to derive the meaning of terms from the context in use.
Ambiguity is very interesting in writing; it's not very interesting in science.
