Quotes About Interpretation

by embracing literary theory, we learn about literature, but more important we are also taught tolerance for other people's beliefs. By rejecting or ignoring theory, we are in danger of canonizing ourselves as literary saints who possess divine knowledge and who can, therefore, supply the one and only correct interpretation for a given text.

Thus, what we observe to be happening in the world says as much about ourselves as it does about the world. It reveals what we think is important, significant, valuable, and sacred, and what is irrelevant or useless too. Put another way, what we see reveals how we see.

The senses affect us so powerfully that we often use one sense to describe another. We use physical words—for heaviness and lightness, hardness and softness—to describe colors. We use visual words—for brightness and darkness, focus and blurriness—to talk about sounds. So we use metaphors to describe metaphors

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution.

undistorted interpretation of external sounds in the mind of a dreamer could not continue to exist in a dreaming mind, because that touch of relative realness would be of awakening and not of dreaming.

When we walk into a wood, we share its sensory outputs (light, colour, smell, sound and so on) with all the other creatures there. But would any of them recognise our description of the wood? Every organism creates a different world in its brain. It lives in that world.

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.

Some translators turn an author's words from gold to stone, others from stone to gold.

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it... Being alive is the meaning.

We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of exact science are mathematics and logic: the mathematical sect puts out the logical eye, the logical sect puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it sees better with one eye than with two. The consequences are ludicrous.

The only difference between graffiti and philosophy is the word "[f*@%]."

Painters and poets have liberty to lie.

Nothing is to be called a fault in poetry, says Aristotle, but what is against the art: therefore a man may be an admirable poet, without being an exact chronologer.

When you unprose language, does it become poetry?

A poet looks at the world somewhat as a man looks at a woman.

...lyrical poems, deriving from everywhere and nowhere as is the case with all poetry...

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

A poet can translate birdsong much more faithfully than the biologist ever could.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

If a poet writes in gibberish, his soul yet understands.

Is there such a thing as pure unmingled poetry, poetry independent of meaning? Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

A poem compresses much in a tight space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art ;and artists happen to be human beings.