Quotes About Interpretation

Words, too, have genuine substance — mass and weight and specific gravity.

This process of interpretation, or sometimes misinterpretation, which has much to do with the expectations we bring to any given event, is one reason we might get the impression that there is a mismatch between perception and reality

Per così dire», iva. Mi piace questa parola, iva. Dev'essere sanscrito. Certe cose Calasso le sa. Davanti a tipi come lui che capiscono il sanscrito non puoi che restare a bocca aperta. In ogni caso, ben venga l'apologetico quando si è davanti all'approssimativo. O al titubante. O al decisamente arrischiato. Ogni traduzione dovrebbe avere iva in appendice.

Your ticket says via Pordenone," he told me. "Don't you read your documento di viaggio?" I was fascinated. What kind of man is it who imagines that when one buys a train ticket one then stops to read it?

What I'm suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of "system" or "conversation" we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.

And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, 'So you've come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical.

Glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. There is no way around this. Translators are celebrated when they translate celebrated books.

The purpose of reading is not to pass some final judgement on the text, but to engage with what it has to offer to me now.

There's no use arguing with someone's subjective experience,

We see a seventeenth-century goblet and think: That is what a seventeenth-century goblet looks like, and isn't it remarkably like/unlike (choose one) goblets today? We tend not to think: What is a goblet doing there? Who made it? Where did it come from? Why did the artist choose to include it instead of something else, a teacup, say, or a glass jar?

Upshaw—Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis's friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, "perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized," as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.

beliefs are perhaps more allegorical than factual.

The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine on harvest day, from victory stands.

la hora de valorar un producto nuevo, me centro en sus aspectos novedosos (no en todos ellos) e interpreto de forma exhaustiva cómo pueden impactar en las emociones de los consumidores que lo usen. Después de eso, considero cómo pueden evolucionar esos mismos aspectos con el tiempo.

Reality is negotiable.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."—Henry David Thoreau

A good general strategy is reasoning counterfactually: if someone tells you that X is true, ask yourself—(i) what would they say if X really is true, and (ii) what would they say if X is false? If the answer to (i) and (ii) is "they will say roughly what they just said now," then their words provided you with exactly zero information. In general, know when it's really important not to take people's words at 100 percent face value.

2—10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it and treat it as math.

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.

Science is all metaphor.

A symbol is a form that represents something else.

The Bible is the only reliable source for these life-interpreting facts.

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.

What to read? Any good novel enlivens our ability to think about ambiguous situations and judge the intentions of others.