Quotes About Interpretation

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

English teachers often take a right-wrong stance. I'd rather my students take a thinking stance.

writing is performance.

In writing, authors use modes to make meaning and clarity.

You can't tell the reader what it means at the end. The reader has to know what it means, and feel what it means. The reader has to be there experiencing the text. —Don Murray

Instead of countering Plato's argument, or approving it or modifying it, Derrida insists on its instabilities. It is inhabited at every turn by an undecidability that it cannot fully master.

lost. So the /p/ is in a way present, though not simply so. It is carried as a trace in the /b/, necessarily

Does this eradicate CONTEXT? For Derrida, no. There are contexts, but they have no centre and can never entirely govern meanings.

Derrida has argued that communication is always subject to iterability, citation and grafting. If so, it can't be taken as a guaranteed, masterable passage of meanings. Language, Derrida says, is a "non-masterable dissemination". If that's the case, we lose absolute assurance that we can "say what we mean" or "know what someone is thinking".

What remains difficult to fathom is how White, a president of the American Historical Association, justified to himself his grotesquely unhistorical (mis) use of sources—from resorting to the romanticized fictions of Washington Irving for "facts" about Columbus to the strategic truncation of a quotation from St. Augustine to make the African Doctor appear to say something exactly opposite to what he meant.

The difficult part of knowledge is not stating a fact, but representing that fact in a useful way.

through the sensory nerves. The nerves only send spikes. And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we do perceive must be fabricated in the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound, and touch are creations of the brain; they only exist in its model of the world.

Chinese Room

Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist.

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story.

Perhaps Dexter's dutiful but uninspired brain pictured him as Sherlock Holmes, able to examine the wheel ruts and deduce that a left-handed hunchback with red hair and a limp had gone down the road carrying a Cuban cigar and a ukulele. I would find no clues, not that it mattered.

I knew I was supposed to understand that Rita was actually saying something very specific, that her pauses and stutters added up to a great and marvelous thing that a human male would intuitively grasp. But I had not a single clue as to what it might be, nor how to figure it out. Should I count the breaths? Time the pauses and convert the numbers to Bible verses to arrive at the secret code? What was she trying to tell me? And why, for that matter, was she trying to tell me anything at all?

I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself.

Is that what you call it now?" she said, and although her words might as well have been in Estonian, for all the sense they made, her tone was very clear, and it did not hold even the memory of anything pleasant. I

For some quixotic reason, Deborah had studied French in high school, and for a few seconds she apparently thought it was going to help her understand the man. She watched him as he raced through several paragraphs, and then finally shook her head. "Je nais comprend—Goddamn it, I can't remember how to say it. Dexter, get somebody up here to translate." The

She lifted both hands chest-high and shook them from the wrist, and I very clearly thought, Wow. She's wringing her hands.

Instead of accepting the decision of this then august tribunal—the ultimate authority in the interpretation of constitutional questions—as conclusive of a controversy that had so long disturbed the peace and was threatening the perpetuity of the Union, it was flouted, denounced, and utterly disregarded by the Northern agitators, and served only to stimulate the intensity of their sectional hostility.

eager' and 'anxious' aren't the same, or how 'disinterested' doesn't mean 'uninterested.

Maree may have noted that I said "wife" and not "ex," which imparted some information to her. She was smarter than the package suggested. She frowned her sympathy, which I didn't respond to.