Discursive Quotes

#1. If, as Marshall McLuhan once taught us, the medium is the message, then Derfner's medium-this lovely, discursive amalgamation of wit and smarts-is indeed his message about how to stay happy, sane, and honest in whatever situation one finds oneself in.

Philip Gambone

#2. [I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.

David Bentley Hart

#3. In the first part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the master-faculty is the Discursive Reason.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#4. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.

Annie Dillard

#5. Long, discursive, dry, and inane are the prayers in many pulpits. Without unction or heart, they fall like a killing frost on all the graces of worship. Death-dealing prayers they are. Every vestige of devotion has perished under their breath. The deader they are the longer they grow.

E. M. Bounds

#6. discursive regimes of the late eighteenth century drew the figure of man into the sand, and even if he manages to survive the etching, typing, and storing of the late nineteenth-century analog media, he is certain to disappear with the compression of that sand into silicon.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young

#7. Death is a cessation of the impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the strings that move the appetites, and of the discursive movements of the thoughts, and of the service to the flesh.

Marcus Aurelius

#8. Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge.

Larry Sultan

#9. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.

Donna Tartt

#10. [B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Alan Bennett

#11. The analysis of laughter had opened to me points of contact between the fundamentals of a communal and disciplined emotional knowledge and those of discursive knowledge.

Georges Bataille

#12. I'm a discursive thinker, so quotation has played an active role in the structure and content of my books from the beginning.

Masha Tupitsyn

#13. When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

Juan Goytisolo

#14. Our understanding is a faculty of concepts, i.e., a discursive understanding, for which it must of course be contingent what and how different might be the particular that can be given to it in nature and brought under its concepts.

Immanuel Kant

#15. A discursive student is almost certain to fall into bad company. Ten minutes with a French novel or a German rationalist have sent a reader away with a fever for life.

Robert Aris Willmott

#16. The Mysterious Pass, which opens beyond space and time, is inconceivable by means of discursive thought and has, by definition, no fixed position.

Monica Esposito

#17. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

Alan Bennett

#18. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is
also the discursive/cultural means by which "sexed nature" or "a natural
sex" is produced and established as "prediscursive," prior to culture,
a politically neutral surface on which culture acts

Judith Butler

#19. A form of consciousness beyond the veils of discursive thought, a space forever present for those who seek it, not in some far-off wilderness, but in our inner most hearts. When that realization dawns in the depths of one's being, the world effortlessly transforms into that which was sought.

Ian Baker

#20. We are caught in a traffic jam of discursive thought.

Chogyam Trungpa

#21. It might have been supposed that Freddy, whose intellect was not of the first order, would have found it impossible to grasp the gist of an extremely tangled and discursive story, but once more the possession of three volatile and excitable sisters stood him in good stead.

Georgette Heyer

#22. As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

Slavoj Zizek

#23. The Biblical worldview is not given to us in the discursive and analytical language of philosophy and science, but in rich and compact language of symbolism and art.

James Jordan

#24. We have developed a more logical and discursive mode of thought. Instead of looking at a physical phenomena imaginatively, we strip an object of all its emotive associations and concentrate on the thing itself.

Karen Armstrong

#25. Exploring microhistories, cultural history can "track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites," that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power.

Martin Prochazka

#26. The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness.

Okwui Enwezor

#27. Everything is discursive opinion instead of direct experience.

A.R. Ammons

#28. Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

John Fiske

#29. The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought.

Chogyam Trungpa

#30. [Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

Michel Foucault

#31. Loosen the bonds of discursive thought. Extend the circle of caring. Cease armoring against suffering. Wish for others the same happiness you wish for yourself. Be a tender-minded steward of creation.

Marc Ian Barasch