Quotes About Interpretation

Here, perhaps, is a purpose for history, somewhere between the record of death and its constant reinterpretation. Only a history of mass killing can unite the numbers and the memories. Without history, the memories become private, which today means national; and the numbers become public, which is to say an instrument in the international competition for martyrdom.

Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification.

Rather than defining facts or generating interpretations, we are seduced by the notion of hidden realities and dark conspiracies that explain everything.

Not unlike personal perspectives," Siwash said, "we rarely understand map projections that are not our own.

When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.

Those who do not know what love is likens it to beauty Those who claim to know what love is likens it to ugliness -Gin Ichimaru

There's no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.

the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

The farther it gets from the bench it was worked on, the more real the real world becomes.

I thought they may have presumed too much knowledge of certain things for people who are not comedians. Like Montreal. A comic understands what it is and its importance, but someone else may not know about it.

narrative therapy says that who we are is largely a product of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. [...] In other words, our narratives about ourselves don't merely reflect who we are: they help produce who we are.

Thomas Kuhn, who once said that he came to realize that he did not understand a thinker until he could see the world through that thinker's eyes.

I even knew some of the dialogue but it was definitely cool to look at. We always argue that the movies should be loyal but in this case I could argue that it might have been too loyal.

Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.

Without the universal, we lose the ability to interpret the events occurring in our everyday lives—we lose the ability to find meaning—because it is only the universal that makes interpretation possible.

The story you are about to read is a work of fiction. Nothing - and everything - about it is real.

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature

The job of the artist is not to resolve or beautify, but to hold complexities, to see and make clear.

The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to look at things too tragically.

A photograph is a cipher for which we consult our own code books.

Scribes working throughout Christianity's first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament's discrepancies...In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining.

Invariably, identical facts provoke starkly different interpretations.

If you know a person's personality type their behavior begins to make sense.

As life often seems to boil down to the outcome of such interactions, it is worth understanding what is happening below the surface of what is actually said, and how to manage an encounter while keeping everyone's dignity intact.