Quotes About Interpretation

The proper function of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Art-speech is the only truth.

How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things.

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were on ravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things.

For him, it was not yet quite natural to express himself in speech. Gesture and grimace were instantaneous, and spoke worlds of things, if you would but accept them.

He hated you for what you said: that his tubified art is sentimental and self-important.

The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Whether it turned into wine or whether it didn't, he said, it doesn't bother me. I take it for what it is. And what is it? she asked, quickly, hopefully. It's the Bible, he said. That answer enraged her, and she despised him.

Well, that is the seductive charm of history; she convinces one that a partial view is the total view and drives the passionate to act. Here lies, precisely, the liberatory potential of history. One who waits for the total view will never act nor even take a plunge into history.

Uchiyama R?shi subtitled his interpretive translation and commentary of this important work Finsei Ry?ri no Hon, or How to Cook Your Life. The word ry?ri, the meaning of which to be sure includes the cooking and preparation of food, also has broader connotations. Ry?ri may also be used in the sense of conducting or handling one's affairs. The implication of this title is that the author tells us how we should go about conducting our lives and treating everything

There is nothing either good or bad," said Shakespeare, "but thinking makes it so.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.

that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

Only there's two sides to every story, you know. You just remember that.

You know what 'Dolores' means? It's Latin, means sadness. Our Lady of Sorrow. Why are you so sad?

The truth, as I saw it, was that Daddy wouldn't have left if she hadn't always been Miss Doom and Gloom. "Pretty?" she said. "Really?" "Yeah, pretty ugly." Her lip shook. She reached for her spray. "God, I was only kidding," I said. "Can't you even take a joke?

My words itch at your ears till you understand them

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it; Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?

Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it;

All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.

A real translation is transparent.