Quotes About Interpretation

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Reconstructions based on bone remains can only reveal the most general characteristics of the creature, since the really distinctive morphological features of any animal are soft tissues which quickly vanish after death. Therefore, due to the speculative nature of the interpretation of the soft tissues, the reconstructed drawings or models become totally dependent on the imagination of the person producing them.

Communication isn't as simple as saying what you mean. How you say what you mean is crucial, and differs from one person to the next, because using language is learned social behavior: How we talk and listen are deeply influenced by cultural experience. Although we might think that our ways of saying what we mean are natural, we can run into trouble if we interpret and evaluate others as if they necessarily felt the same way we'd feel if we spoke the way they did.

Comics are words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

When people ask me what makes movies great, it's the material.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women.

My mom insisted on saying such things, even though almost no one understood what she meant. My Dad sometimes called her Addlebrain because she read so many books.

postmoderns have lost faith in the idea of objective verification. Instead, they focus on the persuasive power of the stories we tell

Funny how mishearing things-or not hearing them at all-can really screw things up

A crease found it's way onto Joss's forehead. Because he was certain that Sirus was wrong. Girls were more complicated than boys. Girls communicated in a language that only they understood. And Joss wasn't sure at all that he would ever understand them.

Postmodernists have been at the leading edge of promoting the view that reality is socially constructed.

In times of stability, when inherited wisdom allows individuals to prosper and spread across relatively homogeneous landscapes: Culture reigns. But in times of expansion into new frontiers, when innovation and interpretation, and communication of new ideas, are critical: Consciousness reigns.

Humor is the mechanism by which we sort out the gray area of what can and can't be said. A humorless society, community, or group of friends likely has large problemas lurking just beneath the surface.

In each case, the belief is literally false, but metaphorically true.

Most religions teach us to be good people. It's only what men can do with religions that make them bad.

I'm all for that suggestion." "Don't grin at me like that. We're both keeling

Sometimes, when the sun is shining, it's daytime,"Robert snapped. "And sometimes, when it's dark, it's because there's an eclispe,"Leslie snapped back.

To write, one only needs a pen. Of course, by pen I mean enclosure.

So what are your poems about? They're about ... how nothing is about, they're not about about. --Heather McHugh, 20-200 on 747

There's always more to the story, Catriona," She replied. "That's the wonderful thing about stories.

Football means soccer, squash is soda, bonkers is nuts—I'm going to need an interpreter or something.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please. —Mark Twain

It's weird how we do that, you know, just fill in the blanks with our own answer key. -- I think we create our own reality, our own truths. If we believe it to be so, then it is so.