Quotes About Interpretation

Reality is defined not as something that exists out there for the scientist or anyone else to discover but as a social construction that emerges from and is sustained by social interaction.

When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does.

To write a book about Mickey Mantle and not to show people who he really was doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So I decided the only way to do this is call it a novel and plow full-speed ahead as to what my interpretation and my estimation of who he was and what was troubling him. This is a very complicated book. It's hardly just about sex.

When you added dialogue to your piece, I really understood how Amy [the character] felt." This is not so much praise as a causal statement—you did this [added dialogue], with this consequence [I understood how the character felt]. Causal process statements are at the heart of building agency.

There is no question that "discourse penetrates a fair way into the perceptual system" (Harre and Gillet 1994, p. 169).

Feelings, too, are socialized—we learn what they are, or rather, we acquire meanings for them.

The trouble with great literature is that any asshole can identify with it.

Philosophy makes literature clear, literature makes philosophy real.

Perhaps even atheism versus theism is an example of this principle that an apparent either/or can really be a both/and. For I suspect that the God you insist does not exist is probably a God I also insist does not exist; and perhaps the God I maintain does exist is a God you have never denied.

It's the same world as ours but also a different world because no two people see it in exactly the same way.

It's just as dangerous and just as heretical to under—do as to over—do what Scripture says.

For Our Purposes, I define reading as looking at printed words and getting enough meaning from them to satisfy your purpose.

What is that instrument?" Aly asked the head guard. When he returned a blank stare, she pantomimed playing the instrument. "A zither?" "Santur," he said.

There is a difference between right and wrong, always was and always will be, but each man's wrong and each man's right are different.

The boy Weneluke wove hand patterns with a string, working skillfully into abstract designs on all eight fingers: one of these represented a man and woman facing each other, and, by manipulating each sex, he arrived at a nice parody of copulation.

Man wants the truth about Ed Watson," Daniels jeered. "Where you aim to find it? Smallwoods'll tell you their truth, Hardens'll tell you theirs. Fat-ass guard out there, he'll tell you his and I'll give you another. Which one you aim to settle for and make your peace with?

Half-familiar sounds could be dimly recognized as words through the swirls and eddies of Provençal: demain became demang, vin became vang, maison became mesong.

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.

This is where it begins to get mind-bending. The colors we experience are just appearances in the mind. The light itself does not have color; it is simply energy with a particular frequency, the color coming from the representation of that frequency in the mind. The same is true of every other quality we experience. We seem to be experiencing the world directly, but in truth all that we experience is a representation of the world out there appearing in our field of knowing.

To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact

It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.

All of this could have happened, and some of it did, but not in that way.

In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

You're dying to hear what she said. And you will. The three principles are: "One. If something is free to be taken, take it. "Two. Other people exist so that you may use them. "Three. Nothing on earth means anything, or can mean anything, but what it is.