“We have always sought explanations when it was only representations that we could seek to invent.”

“Ultimately, discovery and invention are both problems of classification, and classification is fundamentally a problem of finding sameness. When we classify, we seek to group things that have a common structure or exhibit a common behavior.”

“The representational nature of maps, however, is often ignored – what we see when looking at a map is not the word, but an abstract representation that we find convenient to use in place of the world. When we build these abstract representations we are not revealing knowledge as much as are creating it.”

“[M]any people would accept that we do not really have knowledge of the world; we have knowledge only of our representations of the world. Yet we seem condemned by our consitution to treat these representations as if they were the world, for our everyday experience feels as if it were of a given and immediate world.”

“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.”

“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

“The teacher does best, not when he explains, but when he impels his pupils to seek themselves the explanation.”

“Oh, the things we invent when we are scared
and want to be rescued.”

“[When suggested he could have invented crisps] I couldn’t have invented crisps. […] I don't really want to be known as the man who invented crisps. […] I invented apples. […] I invented pandas, and caps. I invented soil.”