Quotes About Interpretation

Commandment 3: Learn to recognize and decode nonverbal behaviors that are universal

Commandment 4: Learn to recognize and decode idiosyncratic nonverbal behaviors.

Commandment 9: Knowing how to distinguish between comfort and discomfort will help you to focus on the most important behaviors for decoding nonverbal communications.

USING PACIFIERS TO READ PEOPLE MORE EFFECTIVELY

Concerted (effortful) observation—is absolutely essential to reading people and detecting their nonverbal tells successfully.

Details ensure accuracy and help avoid the risk of overlooking meaningful or nuanced behaviors

Poetry is like a beef bouillon cube; it's hardly ever needed (or perhaps never needed at all); it sits in its precious wrapper, well out of view, until everyone has forgotten it's there.

Another lesson to emerge is that in a complex technological disaster, hardware by itself won't solve the problem. You need to think things through, to diagnose and analyze and interpret.

A severe example is the common modern American phrase "I could care less," which, it turns out, means the same thing as "I couldn't care less.

In his play House master, one character complains of another that "he can translate English into a Greek not spoken in Greece, and Greek into an English not spoken anywhere").

People who study eschatology

The view we take in the following pages is that culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs--hunting, for instance--tend, in archaic society, to take on the play form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world.

It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness

Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.

So, reader, should you ever find yourself writing about the world, take care not to nibble at the many tempting symbols she sets squarely in your path, or you'll be baited into saying things you don't really mean, and offending the people you want most to entertain. Develop, if you can, the technique of the pall bearers and myself: smile, to be sure -- for fucking dogs are truly funny -- but walk on and say nothing, as though you hadn't noticed.

remember that there's always another way of seeing things: that's the beginning of wisdom.

T]he world is richer in associations than meanings . . . and it is the part of wisdom to distinguish between the two.

The story of your life is not your life. It is your story.

The necessity for an observer makes perfect observation impossible.

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

lay loooo-yah! A-layyyy-loo yah!" He had abandoned his tenor and was singing in a wavering falsetto.

Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I For you a liar am a thousand times . . . .

I had told the truth, or a version of it, anyway.

The only thing I'd tell Maude, if she was here, is that she runs the risk of sounding a little anti-man at times, don't you agree? All the husbands in her novels are stupid, insensitive, faithless individuals with murky pasts, empty heads, micro-penises and questionable morals. But I suppose she had a good imagination, as all writers must, and she was simply making things up.