Quotes About Interpretation

The fact is that none of us can unilaterally decide what a word means. Meanings of words are shared between people - they are a kind of social contract we all agree to - otherwise communication would not be possible.

To ask for a map is to say, "Tell me a story.

A story or novel is a kind of map because, like a map, it is not a world, but it evokes one (or at least one, for each reader.

The purpose of a story or poem, unlike that of a diary, is not to record our experience but to create a context for, and to lead the reader on, a journey.

A map may be beautiful, but if it doesn't tell us what we want to know, or clearly illustrate what it means to tell us, it's merely a decoration.

To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmaker's culture.

How we see depends, in part, on what we want to see.

Every map intends not simply to serve us but to influence us.

As readers, we are content, even delighted, to be lost, in the sense that we are both absorbed and uncertain of where we are or where we are going, as long as we feel confident we are following a guide who has not only the destination but our route to it clearly in mind.

We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.

The desire to replicate the—or a—viewer's view is realism's reason for being.

Our descriptions are an acknowledgment of our unspoken agreement with the reader that we are not simply telling a tale but evoking an imaginary world.

Let's step back from this debate and consider how it affects the question we are currently investigating, the role of war in the rise of archaic states. While there is confusion resulting from competing definitions, and a great degree of controversy about evidence and how to interpret it, all parties agree on one thing: warfare was particularly vicious among pre-state farming societies.

The Manchester Guardian noted: 'People do not understand this legalistic attitude to affairs of life and death.

Send that, he told her. Sign it, et cetera. Work the sentences, if you wish, so that they will mean something. As she started from the office he added, Or so that they mean nothing. Whichever you prefer.

Make it? Fred echoed. Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your turns. The Latin for 'make' is facere, which also reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for 'to fuck', and I haven't...

God, they read a book, he thought, and they spout on forever.

Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?

It looks," Lotze said, gazing down, "as if it was designed by a Jew.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly?

to the Bleekmen, we Earthmen may very well be hypomanic types, whizzing about at enormous velocity, expending huge amounts of energy over nothing at all.

You will manually feel this object with your left hand," he said to himself, "and at the same time you will look at it with your right. And then in your own words you will tell us—" He could not think out any more nonsense. Not without their help.

She scrutinized him with a mixture of pleasure and pity; or so he read her expression.