Quotes About Interpretation

The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own mind.

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

Theologians have by this time stretched their minds so as to embrace the darwinian facts, and yet to interpret them as still showing divine purpose. It used to be a question of purpose AGAINST mechanism, of one OR the other. It was as if one should say My shoes are evidently designed to fit my feet, hence it is impossible that they should have been produced by machinery.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

If I should now utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform, it would make many of you revise your ideas as to the probable worth of my philosophy.

a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries

and what I know from my studies and from my life is that there is no such thing as a true event. We know dates and times and locations and participants but accounts of what happened depend upon the perspective from which the event is viewed.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

Well, sometimes," Dane said, "Just because someone uses something wrong doesn't mean it's useless.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ...It really depends on your perspective.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

Oh for God's sake," he said. The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote.

Tutte le note erano come a strati, un palinsesto di interpretazione in progresso. Feci archeologia.

No existe nada igual en ningún sitio -dijo -. En ningún sitio. No se trata de los sonidos. No es en los sonidos donde vive el significado.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.