Quotes About Interpretation

They don't say what they mean." "No one says what they mean." "No one says what they mean all the time. Most people say what they mean sometimes. Usually." "Teenagers done know what they mean.

Poems are surmountable. They have rhymes and rhythms to help you make meaning. They're short enough. . . to read and reread until you've made some sense of them. Short stories are a different ballgame. You read them and understand the words completely. You know what happens in each sentence. You follow the dialogue and action. at the end, you know exactly what's happened. And also you have no idea.

He said nothing. Very sarcastically.

Tell me about yourself, Miss Russell." I started to give him the obligatory response, first the demurral and then the reluctant flat autobiography, but some slight air of polite inattention in his manner stopped me. Instead, I found myself grinning at him. "Why don't you tell me about myself, Mr. Holmes?

But see, that's the thing about movies. Nothing is left to the imagination. You read a book, and you see a picture of the characters and the scenes in your mind. You don't have that with a movie. It's all either up there on the screen laid out for you, or it isn't there at all.

I've created, directed and choreographed for Lady Gaga since the beginning, so 'Born This Way ' this was musically such an amazing evolution and such a brilliant record. So when she played it for me, it took me a while to find out the visual interpretation that I could give back to her.

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Sex is just another form of talk, where you act the words instead of saying them.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

We live" writes Pursewarden somewhere, "lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.

I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale

Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

finding a book is no guarantee that you will understand what it means unless there is also someone there who read it to you when you were very young and who may, indeed, have it memorized." (p 154)

But everyone dreams anyway. And we-from Joseph to Daniel to Freud-have had dreams, read them, interpreted them, hidden from them, and even, on occasion, faithfully chanted them from a handwritten parchment scroll. They are an intimate part of our

What first occurs to us on remembering the dream/reading the text may be the most important thing.

As any good teacher of dreams will tell you, you are all the people in your dream. Fritz Perls taught, "[All] the different parts, any part in the dream-is yourself, is a projection of yourself."22 And to ask why we made our story this way and not that way is to reenter our sacred text once again as living participants. We could have made it another way, but chose to cast it in this one. We must be all the parts of our dream, even the ones we don't like.

Analyzing the name of a thing can thus reveal something about the thing itself. The same thinking forms the basis of that branch of Jewish Kabbalah known as gematria, and its Christian versions that were explored in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

I really didn't say everything I said. [...] Then again, I might have said 'em, but you never know.

A painting did not have to be beautiful; it had to be true. Then it was beautiful.

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.

As the blind Milton's memory of light The deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone, Wrought joys for them surpassing all things known In our restricted sphere of sound and sight-- So while the glaring streets of brick and stone Vex with heat, noise, and dust from morn till night, I will give rein to Fancy, taking flight From dismal now and here, and dwell alone, With new-enfranchised senses.

When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always--I think any poet who's worked in form will agree with me--is that the form leads you to what you want to say.