Quotes About Interpretation

I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard. In the same way it surprises me that uneducated seamstresses all over the world can figure out how to put in sleeves and zippers.

I've never understood how so many barely literate people read the Bible so much. It's hard.

Ma wrote true stories; not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes. Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished, and edited to the extent that I'm not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn't matter: the story is the thing.

Our relation to music must remain open, in a way. This is the privilege of music, not to let itself be formalized, to be locked in a certain procedure, in a certain way.

Perhaps that's just what music is: the search for a boundary that is continually being shifted.

Whoever claims to have understood everything with hindsight cannot be taken seriously.

come le figure dipinte non parlano quando le interroghi, così le parole scritte non sanno rispondere che sempre nello stesso modo, quello scelto dall'autore quando ha scritto il libro».

BREAKLIGHT Light keeps on breaking. i keep knowing the language of other nations. i keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. and light just keeps on breaking… Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

Every writer is the amanuensis to their characters

When dealing with my mother, one always had to act in a delicate and prescribed way, though the exact rules of protocol seemed to shift frequently and without advance notice. One day, out of milk was a problem easily dealt with, but on the next it was a symbol of her children's selfishness, our father's failure, and her tragic, wasted life.

it is possible that the Irish word for 'I play the fox', sionnachuighim, is where the word 'shenanigans' comes from.

We know the man by the object[.] Even the moon, the sun, stars, … [t]hat he sees them is an evidence of his own nature.

He who makes God act humanly, declares human activity to be divine[.]

If thy predicates are anthropomorphisms, the subject is an anthropomorphism too.

That which I think only according to the standard of my individuality is not binding on another; it can be conceived otherwise; it is an accidental, merely subjective view.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Music is mediator between spiritual and sensual life.

I like your opera - I think I will set it to music

Is it not beautiful?

La música es una manifestación superior a toda sabiduría de la filosofía.

Only stilted pedants can conceive the idea that there are absolute norms to tell what is beautiful and what is not. They try to derive from the works of the past a code of rules with which, as they fancy, the writers and artists of the future should comply. But the genius does not cooperate with the pundit.

What counts is not the data, but the mind that deals with them. The data that Galileo, Newton, Ricardo, Menger, and Freud made use of for their great discoveries lay at the disposal of every one of their contemporaries and of untold previous generations. Galileo was certainly not the first to observe the swinging motion of the chandelier in the cathedral at Pisa.

The Marxist dialectic is essentially word-fetishism. Every article of the faith is embodied in a word fetish whose double or even multiple meaning makes it possible to unite incompatible ideas and demands. The interpretation of these words, as intentionally ambiguous as the words of the Delphic Pythia, eventually brings the different parties to blows, and everyone quotes in his favour passages from the writings of Marx and Engels to which authoritative importance is attached.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.