Meaning Construction Quotes

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

There is nothing outside the text

I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

I would say that deconstruction is affirmation rather than questioning, in a sense which is not positive: I would distinguish between the positive, or positions, and affirmations. I think that deconstruction is affirmative rather than questioning: this affirmation goes through some radical questioning, but it is not questioning in the field of analysis.

And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.

I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.

It's the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It's all only frames from which the content rises.

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.

A gloss is a total system of perception and language.

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

When people talk, it matters how they place words next to each other.

Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.

In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.

Meaning is what essence becomes when it is divorced from the object of reference and wedded to the word.

Information...exhausts itself in the staging of meaning...[and leads] not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy

I don't think that word - the word pirate - has any real meaning. Or it's something that's had meaning imposed on it.

All I really know in nonfiction is that when I come home, I've got all these notes and I'm trying to figure out what actually happened to me. I usually kind of know what happened, but as you work through the notes, you find that certain scenes write well and some don't even though they should. Those make a constellation of meaning that weirdly ends up telling you what you just went through. It's a slightly different process, but still there's mystery because when you're bearing down on the scenes, sometimes you find out they mean something different than what you thought.

The battle for the world is the battle for definitions.