Quotes About Interpretation

the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.

As we sometimes also say about elements of fashion and etiquette, the way you use English "makes a statement" or "sends a message"—even though these statements/messages often have nothing to do with the actual information you're trying to communicate.

Helping them eliminate the error involves drumming into student writers two big injunctions: (1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind — anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue — your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you're trying to argue for.

After all, show me a man who dislikes being raped slowly and enthusiastically by a hotblooded gorgeous Irish colleen, and I'll show you a man with a problem.

Satellites can see your thoughts, but not through rock,' is like something they might say. In John William's case, it was conscious hyperbole and therefore commentary. At one level, it was reefer-inspired. It was partly for fun. It was other things, too-but not derangement. I give no credence to the interpretation, and I knew him better than anybody.

With many important exceptions, the tone of much American historical writing turned deeply negative during the early twenty-first century. It remained so as these words were written, in 2021.

Marx inverted Hegel's dialectics and stood it right side up, on its feet.

Your strange!" she gushed. (She meant "You're," but Peter felt absolutely certain that she was one of those people who spell it "Your.")

It's strange the way everybody has their own pet notion about Jesus, and nobody's pet notion seems to agree with anybody else's.

Paul wrote,"Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God."That means that Christians, who have the Spirit of God living within them, have an inward interpreter who helps them to understand what the Bible means.

Ernest Hemingway, much like the Artisan hero in his novel, A Farewell to Arms, wanted to avoid figurative language (the language of inference and interpretation, of metaphor and symbol), trusting only descriptive words to present his perceptions as sensually and realistically as possible.

You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

Sometimes when you hit send, you can imagine the message going straight into the person's heart. But other times, like this time, it feels like the words are merely falling into a well.

We believe in the wrong things, that's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

it's the belief, not the words, that mean everything. it's the floating.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.

It looks like Animal and Miss piggy had sex, I said. And this was the spawn. My eyes! Boomer cried. My eyes! I can't stop seeing it now that you've said it!

I am so used to hints and mixed messages, saying things that might mean what they sort of sound like they mean. Games and contests, roles and rituals, talking in twelve languages at once so the true words won't be so obvious. I am not used to a plainspoken, honest truth.

That whole week, we started to divide things into those two categories: anything or something. A piece of jewelry bougth at a department store: anything. A piece of jewelry made by hand: something. A dollar: anything. A sand dollar: something. A gift certificate: anything. An IOU for two hours of starwatching: something. A drunk kiss at a party: anything. A sober kiss alone in a park: something.

avant-garde , adj. This was after Alisa' show, the reverse-blackface rendition of Gone With the Wind , including songs from the Empire Records soundtrack and an interval of nineteenth-century German poetry, recited with a lisp. What does avant-garde mean, anyway? I asked. I believe it translates as favor to your friends , you replied.

These things do not matter except that they matter to us. We have given them meaning In the same way we have given each other a meaning.

why is it upset? shouldn't it be downset?

All the words we use are stripped bare, so that no one ever knows what anyone else is saying, so that all kindness is cruelty, all selfishness generous, all care callous.

We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.