Quotes About Interpretation

I thought God gave everyone free will," I said. "Which presumably—and evidently—includes the freedom to be incorrect when translating one language into another.

I think that you're dealing with a deity, or at least a demigod." "Jesus," I said. "No, this guy is Finnish, not Jewish," Bob said seriously.

Hebbity bedda," I said, by way of attempting a greeting. My mouth had gone rather numb, and my tongue felt like a lead weight. "Jussa hangonna sayke hee." Fix jumped up and down, pointing at me, his voice shrill. "He's casting on us!

The language I wanted from him did not exist in his world.

Of course he wasn't listening to what I said but to all of his imagined resonances of what I said.

The word he used was coup, and I'm not speaking French just to arouse you.

Yahweh, identified as Enlil.

It is wrong to assume that art needs the spectator in order to be. The film runs on without any eyes. The spectator cannot exist without it. It insures his existence.

Films are collections of dead pictures which are given artificial insemination.

No me atrevería a decir que te equivocas, aunque tampoco podría darte la razón.

What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.

Ten watercolors were made from that star.

NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word nothing were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. –Joan Didion

I superstiti si voltano indietro e scorgono presagi, messaggi di cui non si sono accorti.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live..

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

What I saw that night was a world so rich and complex I was disorientated, a world complete unto itself, a world of smooth surfaces broken occasionally by a flash of eccentricity so deep that it numbed any attempt at interpretation.

I WAS trained to distrust other people's versions, but we go with what we have. We triangulate the coverage. Handicap for bias. Figure in leanings, predilections, the special circumstances which change the spectrum in which any given observer will see a situation. Consider what filter is on the lens. So to speak.

I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder.