Quotes About Interpretation

To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

The anthropologist cannot always leave his own shadow out of the picture he draws.

Like storytelling, that incessant loving rush of explaining and repositioning and telling again, all for the sake of finding something shared, something mutually recognized -- so interpreting seemed to me. It seemed a kind of goodness.

How eagerly the words spring into shape, winding themselves around a rigid latticework of meaning like the curling tendrils of ivy that crisscross my window. The skeletal branches, whose intricate fretwork clings to the screen, hold tight against a lashing wind and pelting rain.

It was the tiniest scrap of misinformation, insignificant really. But. . . . That was not the story at all.

She wanted to say in a voice thick and passionate, "you're so wrong", but what was the point of saying that when they didn't realize their rules were only that, their rules, and not some absolute, pre-existing creed that was their mission to interpret and protect?

And of course, if there's one thing we feel we can take as truth in these books it's Katniss and her narrative. But we should ask ourselves whether even this should be above suspicion. Like all first-person narrators, Katniss is her own editor with her own biases: she chooses how to present herself and those around her. Katniss has a stake in the story she's telling and what that stake is changes how she portrays the events and her emotional reaction to them.

how you feel about the product, not in a physical sense, but in a perceptual sense.

A big definition of who you are as a designer, it's the way you look at the world

The funny thing is the songs that people think are about me probably aren't. And the songs that are probably are the ones they wouldn't think... so that's where it kind of is funny.

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. ... As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.

When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.

History never repeats itself, historians do.

He told me it didn't really matter if it was true, it was what the story MEANT that was so important.

Like when people say they slept like a baby. Do they mean they slept well? Or do they mean they woke up every ten minutes, screaming?

said he had a "unique artistic vision," which wasn't exactly a lie. His vision just happened to be shit.

This was a woman with an entire vocabulary of sighs.

It's the writers' job to make it positive. It's my job to make it real.

The first principle concerns the power and subtlety of situational influences. The second involves the importance of people's subjective interpretations of the situation. The third speaks to the necessity of understanding both individual psyches and social groups as tension systems or energy "fields" characterized by an equilibrium between impelling and restraining forces.

Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

Rule 2 raises a whole bunch of questions. Does the wave function collapse abruptly or does it take some time? Does the collapse take place as soon as the system interacts with the detector? Or only later, when a record is made? Or perhaps later still, when it is perceived by a conscious mind? Is the collapse a physical change, which means that the quantum state is real? Or is it just a change in our knowledge of the system, which means the

If Shakespeare and Michelangelo were alive today, and if they decided to collaborate on a comic, Shakespeare would write the script and Michelangelo would draw it. How could anybody say that this wouldn't be as worthwhile an artform as anything on earth?

A great actor is independent of the poet; because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in the prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.