Quotes About Interpretation

Underlying his reasoning here was the presumption that Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers or imagined. The floodgates were now open and others would soon urge, based on their own slanted reading of the plays, that Shakespeare must have been a mariner, a soldier, a courtier, a countess and so on.

In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare's works as autobiographical.

Shakespeare's sonnets give us no access to his personal history.

Over-identification on the part of Shakespeare's biographers had mutated into an over-identification on the part of his readers.

what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain.

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.

Taking a single letter from the alphaber, he said, should make life simpler. I don't see why. Take the F from life and you have lie. It's adding a letter to simple that makes it simpler. Taking a letter from hoarder makes it harder.

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption. A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

It is hard for me to believe that Miss Groby ever saw any work of literature from far enough away to know what it meant. She was forever climbing up the margins of books and crawling between their lines for the little gold of phrase, making marks with a pencil. As Palamides hunted the Questing Beast, she hunted the Figure of Speech. She hunted it through the clangorous halls of Shakespeare and through the green forests of Scott.

It was written all in O, or nearly so, and all the O's are gone, said Andrea. When coat is cat, and boat is bat, and goatherd looks like gathered, and booth is both, since both are bth, the reader's eye is bothered. And power is power, and zero zer, and, worst of all, a hero's her. The old man sighed as he said it. Anoon is ann, and moan is man. Andrea smiled as she said it. And shoe, Andreus said, is she. Ah, woe, the old man said, is we.

When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: "According to tradition..." or "According to the legislature..." Visitors can count on the rest of such sentences to be unsubstantiated.

History is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies.

How people think about the past is an important part of their consciousness.

Any telling of history requires choices as to what is included and what is left out and is therefore by definition an interpretation.

Are you going to tell kids that Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in Jesus? Not me!' a textbook editor exclaimed to me.

A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior. In that role, such explanations satisfy an important emotional demand of distancing us from them.

The older you get, the more theories you make up about things.

Every work of art carries with it a piece of the artist's soul. Paintings are windows to our human experience.

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence, there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.—Confucius

Shakespeare = We all make his

Evil to some is always good to others

Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.

She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.

Well, evil to some is always good to others.