Quotes About Interpretation

my delight in philology, my insistence on having language clear-cut and exact, impels me, when someone says it is cold and someone else that it is warm, to look at the thermometer and say: "Gentlemen, it is 69 degrees Fahrenheit in this room.

When politicians and civil servants hear the word culture they feel for their blue pencils.

Reading is an act of possession. You read it, you own it.

Me, I think you only get at gist by assembling all the tiny inconclusive anecdotes that would fall flat at a dinner table and that seem irrelevant until you collect them in a pile.

There is a tendency for humans to consciously see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individual's personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.

The poet... may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood

Where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty.

Her favorite animal was sea lions. Mine was giraffes. Her favorite movie was Casablanca, which she said was old and black-and-white and very romantic. She tried to tell me what it was about, but it all sounded about as much fun as eating burned bread crusts.

They weren't bad books, Phin countered patiently. They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a 'good book' for someone

Just that. What? What did it mean? What did any of it mean? Did it mean he was sorry? Did it mean she should forgive him? Or that he had forgiven her? Who was right? Who was wrong?

Well, like I say. That is your interpretation of events. I just recall a girl who was disappointed and pissed off because she wasn't going to get to do the things she wanted to do, and a brand-new husband left feeling a little inadequate and scared that the girl would rather leave him and find someone who did

They weren't bad books," Phin countered patiently. "They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a 'good book' for someone." I

Kim scans it quickly

They weren't bad books, Phin countered patiently. 'They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a 'good book' for someone.

The word "mistress" sounds like a cross between mistake and mattress.

My goodness, do you take everything so literally?" "I'm an engineer

It's impossible to make a picture without values. Values are the basis. If they are not, tell me what is the basis.

I do not believe there are any circumstances in which a judge should consider his or her own values or policy preferences in determining what the law means.

Judges who take the law into their own hands, who make up constitutional 'rights' in order to strike down laws they oppose, undermine the people's right to have their values shape public policy and define the culture.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

Similarities in the vampire genre are so rampant that there's really no such thing as an original idea - only an original take on an idea that's been done before.