Quotes About Interpretation

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.

The value of art is in the observer.

I don't mind UFO's and ghost stories, it's just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

I come from a part of Nigeria where a lot of value is placed on implicit communication. The 'well brought up' child is the one who can pick up nonverbal cues from adults and interpret them correctly.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

Every individual's listening is as unique as his or her fingerprints because we all listen through filters that develop from our personal mix of culture, language, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations and intentions. That is why one person's musical taste is another person's hideous noise.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

A "crisis" is not an objective state of affairs but a matter of interpretation. Populist will often eagerly frame a situation as a crisis, calling it an existential threat, because such a crisis then serves to legitimate populist governance.

Molecular studies (of so-called mitochondrial DNA) were initially also interpreted in terms of an African origin of modern humans, though the meaning of those molecular findings is currently in doubt.

signs , , and to represent the syllables yu, sa, and na, respectively.

Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.

making yourself understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream , I must be dafter than I look.

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.

To each our own Hamlet.

Unless the hole is MEANT to be square,' I said with a sudden erudition that surprised me, 'in which case, all the round pegs are the ones that are wrong, and if the ROUND hole is one that is not meant to be square, then the square ones will, no, hang on--' 'Shame,' said the historian, 'and you were doing so well.

being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.

This is Fiction, and the truth is whatever you make it. You can interpret the situation in any way you want, and all of the scenarios could be real -- and what's more, depending on how you act now, any one of them could become real.