Quotes About Interpretation

my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And

Aristotle said in the poetics, that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.

Joan Miró: You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

And that's why I've chosen to write these pages as I've written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.

really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular.

And if what they say is true--if every great painting is really a self-portrait--what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?

There wasn't a single meaning. There were many meanings. It was a riddle expanding out and out and out.

I often thought how peculiar my life must look to someone reading those letters, far away.

You know what Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

Picasso says. 'Bad artists copy, good artists steal.

I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story.

A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.

What if—is more complicated than that? What if maybe opposite is true as well? Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?

Goyen there. Sadly not for sale." "Van Goyen? I would have sworn that was a Corot." "From here, yes, you might." He was pleased at the comparison. "Very similar painters—Vincent

On the way to Francis's, a pregnant dog ran across the road in front of us. "That," said Henry, "is a very bad omen." But of what he wouldn't say.

Una cosa era ver un cuadro en un museo, pero contemplarlo bajo todas esas luces, estados anímicos y estaciones diferentes era apreciarlo de mil formas distintas; guardarlo encerrado en la oscuridad —un objeto hecho de luz, que solo vivía en la luz— no estaba bien por muchas razones que no sabría explicar.

There's only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.

understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;

the line of beauty is the line of beauty. It doesn't matter if it's been through the Xerox machine a hundred times.

It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods amd seasons was to see it a thousamd different ways

We do not create meaning out of a text; rather, we seek to find the meaning that is already there.

The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics.

The theistic evolutionist considers the days in Genesis as periods of time, long periods of time. I do not believe that is true. God's marking off the creative days with the words, "And the evening and the morning were the first day," etc., makes it clear that He was not referring to long periods of time but to actual twenty-four hour days.

Never judge a book by its movie.