Quotes About Interpretation

If I'm a guy who doesn't seem so merry, It's just because I'm so misunderstood. When I was young I ate a dictionary, And that did not do me a bit of good. For I've absorbed so many words and phrases— They drive me dizzy when I want to speak. I start explaining but each person gazes As if I spoke in Latin or in Greek.

What we are probably given is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Life is 10 what you make it, and 90 how you take it.

Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind it is a way of engaging reality.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.

A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice.

When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.

Consider this: Could it be true that, in all Russian literature, there isn't a single clear and joyous depiction of the sun?

A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

This is what I like about being a designer: You can't really get it until you see it.

God gave the prophecies, not to gratify men's curiosity by enabling them to fore know things, but that after they were fulfilled they might be interpreted by the event, and His own providence, not the interpreters, be thereby manifested to the world.

you can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it

we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section.

People] cannot live without seeking to describe and explain the universe to themselves. The models they use in doing this must deeply affect their lives, not least when they are unconscious; much of [their] misery and frustration…is due to the mechanical and unconscious, as well as deliberate, application of models where they do not work…The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist [people] to understand themselves and thus operate in the open and not wildly, in the dark.

To some if you owned your own mind you were indeed sick but when you possessed an Atonist mind you were healthy. A mind which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean.

No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say.