Quotes About Interpretation

beginning of this book that the instruction in reading that it provides applies to anything you have to or want to read. However,

Regression analysis is the hydrogen bomb of the statistics arsenal.

In fact it [Venturi's design] is best described not simply as a response to the program but as a response to the reality behind the program.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

When I realize how distorted even recent events have become, history as such only arouses my scepticism. Whereas a poetic interpretation achieves a general effect of the period. After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

He said if a tree fell down in a forest, and there was nobody there to hear it, would it make a sound? I think what he meant was that sounds only become sounds when we hear them, otherwise it's just waves that go through the air. So if there were no ears there to pick up the sound waves then is there any sound at all?

If you write a book and nobody reads it, does the book exist? Stories in books, characters and things, you know, like places and monsters or whatever the writer has made up and written down, they only really come alive when we read them. Otherwise it's just a jumble of squiggles on bits of paper.

Yeah, good to see you too. Her hand stays on the gun. "Did I say it was good to see you, Joe? "No, but I always try to read between the lines. Figured you going for your gun was how you express affection these days.

There's no way to approach anything in an objective way. We're completely subjective our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world.

I wanted to deal with someone's idea of their relationship.

After scolding one's cat one looks into its face and is seized by the ugly suspicion that it understood every word. And has filed it for reference.

Most men's eyes, when you look at them critically, are not like that. They may look at you very expressively, but when you look at them, just as features, they are not very nice.

Our laws as we support them now are slow, wasteful, cumbrous systems, which require a special caste to interpret and another to enforce; wherein the average citizen knows nothing of the law, and cares only to evade it when he can, obey it when he must.

there are some things one takes for granted, supposes are mutually understood, and to which both parties may repeatedly refer without ever meaning the same thing.

We evaluate ourselves based upon what we like to think… Others evaluate us based upon coming over/around or through…

You can't translate something that was never in a language in the first place.

Silence is argument carried on by other means.

interpretation is a conversation between text and reader, requiring not detachment but involvement. This conversation is often called the "hermeneutic circle." Our life situation will necessarily determine the questions we bring to the text, and hence strongly influence what it says and means to us. At the same time, the text maintains its own integrity, and we owe it to ourselves and the text to try to enter into its world as much as possible.

What I look for when I see a piece of art for the first time is some kind of emotional, intellectual experience, that's a combination of both of those things and is informed by my knowledge and something new that I see the artist doing.

The distance between an honest Christian mystic and a fortune-teller is sometimes less than half a whisper. Less than a pot of tea or the space between two book covers.

What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah?

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.