Quotes About Interpretation

It is interesting that the worst retellings of traditional fairy tales are those that heavy-handedly take the step of making a moral point.

An earthworm close by sighed and said, "Well now, men are clear enough about what they've understood, but can't infer one thing from another. The men who lecture on the Four Books and the Six Classics,1 with their magnificent and noble principles, would none of them understand commentary on their own minds. Thus, once separated from their books, they are unable to understand the mind at all.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

There is no language without deceit.

Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can't make anything.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow." - from "The Adventure of a Photographer

Suppose we received from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn't pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and demand to be received and interpreted.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?

When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.

1 )Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them. 2)A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.

With my spyglass I can observe a woman who is reading on a terrace in the valley," I told her. "I wonder if the books she reads are calming or upsetting." "How does the woman seem to you? Calm or upset?" "Calm." "Then she reads upsetting books.

The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.

So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.

Il bassotto alzò il muso verso di lui, con lo sguardo dei cani quando non capiscono e non sanno che possono aver ragione a non capire.

The universe and the void: I'll return to these two terms, between which swings the aim of literature, and which often seem to mean the same thing.

Nella forma che il caso e il vento dànno alle nuvole l'uomo è già intento a riconoscere figure.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

Un classico è un libro che non ha mai finito di dire quel che ha da dire.

A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.