Quotes About Interpretation

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

Adrian Forty was perhaps the first person to propose that the surprise answer to the missing term in the old equation, architecture = buildings + x, was words. If that's right, as I am increasingly persuaded, it explains why so much talk and writing envelops the practice of design.

Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.

The ultimate problem with the approach to the Bible that reads Ezekiel 38–39 alongside the morning newspaper in an attempt to correlate the events described in the two documents is that it assumes that unless we are living in the end times, these passages have nothing to say to us. In fact, whether or not these happen to be the final days of God's plan for the world, Ezekiel 38–39 addresses believers with a powerful message of hope. As

Good laws left to the interpretation of evil men are no longer good.

Talking of his relationship with Jarrett, DeJohnette says, "I love him because, as a pianist and drummer myself, I can identify with him … the concept of what to ignore, what to leave in, what to leave out… we intuitively understand that … that's why when we play together… we never know what's going to happen, but we always get something happening that turns us on.

I never could talk to my sister Molly, because she was loopy

She said being inside a language was like being in a person's house - after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.

When we discuss a novel it is only partially to hear another person's 'view', it is much more to find out what we ourselves think in order to possess the text more completely. Such a possession is then a composite one, it is the book itself and the articulated reaction to it. So vivid can be the latter that it is not uncommon to find that the pleasure survives the cause; some novels seem more enjoyable to talk about than to read.

The moment you fall to your knees in front of a cross, thinking you're praying to some God, you're missing the point. The idea is to look through the symbol to the meaning behind it. Or, as Zen Buddhists put it: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." T

What do you mean, funny? Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?

Funny-peculiar or funny-ha-ha

we only read when you write

Language and how close it comes to truth, and how far away it is.

Hold on, I won't have to read anything, will I? I'm not allowed to look at words, reading's sinful.

All written art is an attempt to communicate what it is to feel.

What reader wants to be told what attitude to strike?

Every novel has at least three stories. Of course, there's story in its pages. But then there's the story of its writing. And there's also the story of its reaching, or not reaching, the bigger world of its readers.

There's an insult buried in there somewhere, but I can't quite see it.

Everything you do from waking till sleeping is against somebody's Bible, Cafferty.

Human beings, on the other hand, are symbolic creatures. Inside their heads they break down the outside world into a mass of mental symbols, then recombine those symbols to recreate that world. What they subsequently react to is often the mental construct, rather than the primary experiences themselves.

Otra faceta destructiva de la psicología humana es que, cuando alguien se ha hecho una idea de algo, aceptará la evidencia que refuerce su opinión y rechazará la que la contradiga.

If we're genuinely interested in a book we can even bring ourselves to be greatful when others draw our attention to things we've missed or misunderstood.

Reading the Koran on its own terms, trying to interpret it without resorting to commentaries, is a difficult and questionable exercise because of the nature of the text-its allusive and referential style and its grammatical and logical discontinuities, as well as our lack of sure information about its origins and the circumstances of its composition. Often such a reading seems arbitrary and necessarily inconclusive. G. R. Hawting