Quotes About Interpretation

You do not separate the human being from the actions he does or the actions which surround him, but you see what it is like to break these actions up in different ways, to allow passion - and it is passion - to appear for each person in his own way.

Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I've never understood why

El historiador es un experto, no un físico. No busca las causas de la explosión en la fuerza expansiva de los gases, sino en la cerilla del fumador

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

Le parole possono essere precise anche al punto da apparire piatte, l'importante è che siano cariche di significato; se usate bene, possono toccare tutte le note.

Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.

There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.

Then she laughed. It was almost a racking laugh. It shook her as the wind shakes a tree. I thought there was puzzlement in it, not exactly surprise, but as if a new idea had been added to something already known and it didn't fit. Then I thought that was too much to get out of a laugh.

His blue eyes frosted. 'Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir?' 'No. But I'm having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.

The average critic never recognizes an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.

We saw what we saw. Whether it was a place or a vision in our mind, it doesn't matter. We must act upon what we experienced, so to that end, yes, it was real.' 'Now?

The psychoanalyst picks our dreams as if they were our pockets." "The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.

A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.

After my book Wanderlust came out in 2000, I found myself better able to resist being bullied out of my own perceptions and interpretations. On two occasions around that time, I objected to the behavior of a man, only to be told that the incidents hadn't happened at all as I said, that I was subjective, delusional, overwrought, dishonest- in a nutshell, female.

the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world is broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.

The names of the colors are sometimes cages containing what doesn't belong there, and this is often true of language generally, of the words like woman, man, child, adult, safe, strong, free, true, black, white, rich, poor. We need the words, but use them best knowing they are containers forever spilling over and breaking open. Something is always beyond.

Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.