Quotes About Interpretation

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance. M. C. RICHARDS

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Each painting has its own way of evolving. . . . When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself. WILLIAM BAZIOTES

La pintura es un intento de asumir la vida. Existen tantas soluciones como seres humanos». GEORGE TOOKER

It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)

Everything has its way of speaking and telling things worth knowing. Even the little grass-blades have their way of saying things as plain as words when human lips let them fall...the choice bits of wisdom...were never written down in any books.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. (quoting Patrick Lagrange)

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?

Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn't give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.

We listen to what people say, we read what they write—that's our evidence, that's our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker's words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle—and then we know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us.

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?

It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - that is a musicologist.

Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on coloured canvas, reveals himself.