Quotes About Interpretation

A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

As a commentary makes no sense without the text which it is expounding, so also the Confessions make no sense without the Bible.

Who is "I" in "I hurt"? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does "hurt" refer to the inflicting or the suffering?

You see, intuition has served me well throughout my career, and I owe a great part of my reputation to it. Adding science and the objective interpretation of great volumes of data to my intuition is the source of my edge. This unique combination is what has always allowed me to stay ahead of the ticker.

She thought there was no greater violence than the one done to meaning.

Silence is also a form of speaking.

Ik weet niet hoe woorden dat tot stand brengen, dat de zin opglinstert en veel meer zegt dan de inhoud van zijn woorden.

At school, your tests only have one right answer and you might get zero or half points if you put the wrong answer. But in what we call ''the real world'', things aren't so black and white, so you should think about things for yourself and express them in words or pictures. This is how you comminicate with people, with other people.

No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say 'No' at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.

It isn't a matter of how long, or even how much you know. It's a way of looking at things, how much you see and how you think. I suppose it's, well, perspective. . . When you start seein' five sides to a four-sided object, that's when you get the gray robe.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

Richard goes with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets 'don't tell anybody' as 'don't tell anybody but Rafe', because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headed people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren't really there.

I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.

For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry

When Gregory says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did they do it?' But when he says, 'Are they guilty?' he means, 'Did the court find them so?' The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

You know what you meant. I only know what you said.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.

The past changes a little every time we retell it.