Quotes About Interpretation

Il complottismo è un campo elettivo per queste agenzie. Esse offrono a buon mercato un prodotto allettante: spiegazioni dei fatti che liberano dall'onere di pensare e che al tempo stesso danno la gratificante sensazione di essere parte di un ristretto nucleo di persone che hanno davvero capito. [...] L'interpretazione critica è per i cittadini, il complottismo è per i sudditi.

Vergil preferred to give a few touches, and to allow the imagination of his readers to fill out the picture: that is one reason for his almost universal appeal. He changes each of his readers into a poet or an artist.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

A good novel tells you the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells you the truth about its author.

I discover that there are other minds in understanding what other people say and do.

In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.

Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

although there may occur a few stages in his argument which are so trite that he can go through them by rote, much of his argument is likely never to have been constructed before. He has to meet new objections, interpret new evidence and make connections between elements in the situation which had not previously been co-ordinated. In short he has to innovate, and where he innovates he is not operating from habit.

une interprétation n'est elle pas assujettie aux émotions de son auteur et à la connaissance ou non du sujet qu'il interprète?

Un lecteur est un être qui manque d'imagination, car autrement il s'écrirait lui-même ses propres fictions.

In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.

Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.

La meilleure façon de commencer est de dire : Balthus est un peintre dont on ne sait rien. Et maintenant, regardons les peintures. (p. 91)

I don't trust words. I trust pictures.

Well it seems to me

the workers were careful when handling oil drums marked as "full." However, workers happily smoked in rooms that stored drums marked "empty." The reason? The word "empty" in English is associated with "nothing"; it seems boring, dull, and easy to ignore. However, "empty" oil drums are actually full of flammable fumes.

She calls these reader moments the quibbles—when she gets stuck in the faulty notion that everything in a book must be grasped. Why should readers be spooked about not knowing all the details in a book about the Philippines yet surge forward with resolve in stories about France?

At times, she feels discomfort over matters she knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist should be holding her hand as she is walked through the story. But she rides the wave, she checks herself. A reader does not need to know everything

I would like to make a movie in which the spectator understands that she is in a work of someone else's construction, and yet as she watches, she is devising her own translations for the movie in which she in fact exists.

You can puzzle over lines all your life and never be satisfied with the meanings you get.

So many things, when you break them down, are about perception. So many things hinge on how we choose to interpret both our own choices and the immovable forces beyond our control. So much rests on having the wisdom, and sometimes the cold-edged fucking ruthlessness, to know the difference.

Part of the trouble is modern. Since the rescuing of the texts by the great philologists of the Nineteenth Century, one school after another has tried to inject its preconceptions into their meaning, according to the way in which they read the history of philosophical ideas. Part is ancient. And it begins very early. Plato, Aristotle, Eudemus, Theophrastus, Proclus, Simplicius are clearly at odds about what Parmenides may really have meant.