Quotes About Interpretation

So often we see solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature. But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.

They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.

Yes, the Americans and the British were alike in some things. They were surface people, skimming over past history, picking out the interpretations that pleased them, never digging deep for the truths that could warn them. When they found something unpleasant, they would forget it within months. They even prided themselves on not remembering; forget and forgive were so much easier. They evaded serious ideas, unless they approved of them.

You could reason out that adults did not have to explain to each other, but instinct was so often more accurate than reasoning.

Scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. This book will discuss various definitions of myth as it goes along, but it is interested in myth as a process as much as a thing.

However, I have also argued for allegory's positive effects. It is a process that typically takes control away from the author of a narrative and gives it to the reader. It is the reader who decides whether to interpret writing on a literal or a symbolic level. In giving greater control to the reader, allegory allows for imaginative and reflective analyses of mythology, and for its ideological purposes to be criticized, as well as affirmed.

Maybe she was not really like that. It's just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified.

I've always had a hard time figuring out what the moral of a story is supposed to be, and she was bound to know: She'd been to college.

It was hard to keep a straight face, but Harriet didn't laugh. Everybody around her was living out a different story in which events had different causes and motivations according to how they were perceived.

Harriet read more voraciously than Simon and Margot ever had. They discouraged this; she'd be so bored once she ran out of texts that were new to her. She surprised them with the discovery that once an avid reader runs out of books, she reads people. Harriet read everybody she met, and when she met them again, she reread them.

One man's folly is another man's wife.

including the fact that 'slut' means 'ends' or 'finished'. So my new washing machine hasn't been abusing me all this time when it stopped and flashed the word 'slut' at me in bright red lights!

Christ Our shared Identity of Oneness. The Self that God created by the extension of His Spirit. Our spiritual Identity. Christ vision Spiritual sight; seeing beyond the body and the ego. Interpreting others behaviors as (1) an act of love or (2) a calling out for love. Seeing both as no reason for defense or attack, and every reason for extending love. The ability to mentally see beyond all worldly interference and see the light of holiness in everything.

El mundo que vemos refleja simplemente nuestro marco de referencia interno:

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

There is no room for absolute truth upon any subject whatsoever, in a world as finite and conditioned as man is himself. But there are relative truths, and we have to make the best we can of them.

All literature is scarry.

I fail to see why you did not understand that groceryman, he did not call it 'ground ground nuts,' he called it ground ground-nuts which is the only really SENSible thing to call it. Peanuts grow in the GROUND and are therefore GROUND-nuts, and after you take them out of the ground you grind them up and you have ground ground-nuts, which is a much more accurate name than peanut butter, you just don't understand English.

I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book lover yet unborn.

Confidence spark One of the best ways to listen to someone is to tune in to the sound of his voice. He may be saying one thing but meaning something else. Focus on the quality of his tone—does he sound stressed or confident? What do you know about him that can help you figure out what he is really saying? If thoughts come up that distract you, just keep focusing on his voice to heighten your awareness of his real motivation and mental state.

The greater part of historical and natural phenomena are not simple, or not simple in the way we would like. —PRIMO LEVI

The philosopher Epictetus said more than two thousand years ago, "Man is not troubled by events but rather how he interprets them.