Quotes About Interpretation

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.

What was a face on television but a code, and what was the difference between these faces but a realignment of line and color to shift among signals? If he grasped deeply this language of symbols, grasped it beneath the surface, he could course through the currents of authority as they coursed through him like heat or the tremble of cold.

It is only by human experiences that we can interpret the Divine.

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

God is revealing Himself to humanity. He is a Word, always speaking. He speaks through His works; all nature interprets Him to us. He speaks through His prophets; all men who have felt the inspiration of His presence interpret Him to us.

Langton, believing Anna's silence was due to distress about

painted three quadrants

How can there be a true History, when we see no man living is able to write truly the History of the last week?', as Sir Will demands in Thomas Shadwell's play The Squire of Alsatia (1688)

When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss (as one calls it) with the other relics, and afterwards together they ate the shit and drank, from which they got such sharp sight that they are able to see such complex glosses in Scripture."38

Mabel likened Lavinia's hand to a demented spider who has fallen into an inkwell.

she declared that speculation had no place in this book that had 'in fact one purpose: to allow Emily Dickinson to speak for herself'. In this way, Todd disclaimed possession in a publication whose prime motive was, in actuality, an act of possession. Without referring to Mattie, it shot Mattie's version of her aunt's life to pieces with well-aimed rhetorical questions: who can know what Dickinson felt for others? Who can know what was momentous?

I'm never exactly a slave to facts at the best of times. But does it matter? Who owns memories after all?

To say that he 'nailed a subject's soul to the canvas' makes the assumption that we persons, as well as artists, can see one another's souls. Maybe we do. Maybe we all have the ability to perceive another's soul, and do so every day, only we take it for granted, and don't even know it when we're doing it. We call it knowing someone's 'character' or 'personality.

Ordinary words simply preserve ideas. Still, you have to be careful. Words can lie, or be misunderstood. Words don't have magic, but they have power.

Although we perceive science as an ultimate truth, science is finally just a story, told in installments.

I tried to think whether I had ever had a great adventure. I decided that I had. It's all in how you look at it.

But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

I apologise if you all know this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying "Giant Kid's Playground", and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer: everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.)

Money itself isn't the problem. Money itself isn't bad or good. Money itself doesn't have power or not have power. It is our interpretation of money, our interaction with it, where the real mischief is and where we find the real opportunity for self-discovery and personal transformation.

Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.

What we look for is what we will see, what we see determines our perspective, and our perspective determines our reality.