Quotes About Interpretation

sólo existen dos modos de tratar la Biblia: o se la toma al pie de la letra, o se la toma en serio.

Seit ich weiss, dass man mit Text nichts mitteilen kann, kann ich Texte verstehen.

Texts do not signify the world, they signify the images they tear up. Hence, to decode texts, means to discover the images dignified by them

This apparently non-symbolic, objective character of technical images lead whoever looks at them to see them not as images but as windows

The human species' ability to believe whatever it wanted was truly incredible.

when a man blends truth and falsehood skillfully in one comprehensive statement, it is difficult to tell the veracities from the fibs.

How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

I want to write a novel about Silence, he said; "the things people don't say.

And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.

He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

Literature is no one's private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.

We're all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person's opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn't know

It appeared that nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for.

Nothing has really happened unless it's been described [in words].

Would there be trees if we didn't see them?

A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Tell me, he wanted to say, everything in the whole world - for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry - but how to speak to a man who does not see you? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depth of the sea instead?

Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.

I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don't say.

I do think all good and evil comes from words. I have to tune myself into a good temper with something musical, and I run to a book as a child to its mother.

So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.