Quotes About Interpretation

A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.

People always went for the romantic interpretation; you couldn't blame them for that. What they felt most strongly seemed most true. But other forces were operating in the world.

A demon, if you prefer the term; although to be honest, the difference between god and a demon is really only a matter of perspective.

Fiction is a tower of glass built from a million tiny truths, grains of sand fused together to make a single, gleaming lie.

We do not— interpret —God's laws to suit ourselves. Or the laws of our country

I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.

Assim, apanhados pela mãe, éramos dois e contrários, ela encobrindo com a palavra o que eu publicava pelo silêncio.

words are like nets - we hope they'll cover what we mean, but we know they can't possibly hold that much joy, or grief, or wonder.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's any less true.

There is no one truth. There's only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

There is no such thing as a fact. There is only how you saw the fact, in a given moment. How you reported the fact. How your brain processed that fact. There is no extrication of the storyteller from the story.

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.

In a lot of ways, having a teenager isn't all that different from having a newborn. You learn to read the reactions, because they're incapable of saying exactly what it is that's causing pain.

Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they were night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven. But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehow I put it all together and figured that the food God served caused multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Once you call something a story, it's set in stone. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end that can't be transformed, because by definition, if you do that, it's not the same story anymore

anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.

Witness testimony is always flawed. It's better than circumstantial evidence, sure, but people aren't camcorders; they don't record every action and reaction, and the very act of remembering involves chosing words, actions and images. In other words, any witness who was supposed to be giving a court facts is really just giving them a version of fiction.

What one person takes away from a book might be very different from what the next person takes away -- almost as if the story is altered depending on who's reading, where, and when. But then, maybe all books are like that -- a little different each time they are opened. The real question is who's doing the changing: the story, or the reader.

But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination.

I would figure out, later, how to explain to my boss that, for me, Delia will never be a story, but a happy ending.