Quotes About Interpretation

nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.

here am I, my hands red with blood and shame and wet with tears, longing to begin telling the story of Jesus, and not just for the sake of making a record of what happened: I want to play with it; I want to give it a better shape; I want to knot the details together neatly to make patterns and show correspondences, and if they weren't there in life, I want to put them there in the story, for no other reason than to make a better story.

maybe from other experiences as well, that there are more ways than one, more than two, of seeing things and perceiving their meanings.

Maybe it means nothing. It just is. Everything means something, Lyra said severely. We just have to find out how to read it.

Everybody has the right to form their own opinion and read what they like and come to their own conclusion about it... I trust the reader.

May I ask a question? Without the books of symbols, how do you read it?" "I just make my mind go clear and then it's sort of like looking down into water. You got to let your eyes find the right level, because that's the only one that's in focus. Something like that," she said.

Nothing is more likely to drive listeners away than a ponderous interpretation of what they've just marvelled at.

Perhaps, she thought calmly, whatever moves the alethiometer's needle is making the Aurora glow too.

in a little adventure that had culminated in her thinking that everything meant something, if only she could read it. The universe had seemed alive then. There were messages to be read everywhere you looked.

The way you see yourself is important, you see. It's as if you carve yourself out of your own interpretation. And so I became the name I was called.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

And as he spoke, I was thinking, 'the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into.

Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them wrong again.

everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

he was seething suddenly with remorse, because of having done what he'd done and because he hadn't done more. Seething with outrage too, about Basel more than anything--as outraged by what Nathan had got right there as by what he'd got wrong, as much by what he'd been making up as by what he was reporting. It was the two in combination that were particularly galling, especially where the line was thin and everything was given the most distorted meaning.

I finally went back to my seat in the second row and sat there doing what I've done throughout my professional life: I tried to think, first, how to make credible a somewhat extreme, if not outright ridiculous story, and, next, how, after telling it, to fortify and defend myself from the affronted who read into the story an intention having perhaps to do less with the author's perversity than with their own.

I saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

The burden isn't that everything has to be a book. It's that everything can be a book. And doesn't count as life until it is.

And talking about books as though something were at stake in a book. Not opening up a book to worship it or be elevated by it or to lose yourself to the world around you. No, boxing with the book.

Simple is never that simple.

Everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to do. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

In nome della ragione, si cerca sempre un motivo più elevato, un significato più profondo: allora avevo ancora l'abitudine di sforzarmi di essere ragionevole anche sull'irragionevole e cercare la complessità nelle cose semplici. Esigevo risposte dalla mia intelligenza, quando non erano affatto necessarie. Pensavo: non può essere così meschino e insulso come sembra. Questo non può essere che un decimo della sua storia. Deve avere, dentro, qualcosa di più.

exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.