Quotes About Interpretation

It is always better to look at a matter positively before ruling negatively on it.

To understand a woman, you have to listen to her when she is looking at you, not when she is talking.

We may assume that we are in control of our responses to the world, but that's far from the case. If two people can see the same thing and have opposite reactions, their responses are controlling them, not the other way around.

Nothing in this world is Good or Bad. Our thinking makes it so. A knife is good when a surgeon uses it to save a life & bad when a terrorist uses it to kill.

His words were simple. They had no art to them, which of course was also art.

I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.

On their faces, disappointment braided with relief.

And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again

The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather, they are manifestations of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way…We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

It was so silly to try to define things by words. What did one person mean by infatuation or obsession and another mean by love. The whole thing couldn't be tidied away with neat little labels." - Lena Gray

Who knows what light housework means? One nun's light could be another nun's penal servitude.

How will I explain it all Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to everybody?" "You know, people don't have to explain things nearly as much as you think they do.

Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty

51. You might as well act as if objects had the colors, The Encyclopedia says. –Well, it is as you please. But what would it look like to act otherwise?

For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it's orange, that we're normal. 39.

The point wasn't that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters' preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters "he", it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.

So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces.

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.

You might even say that it is the business of the eye to make colored forms out of what is essentially shimmering. This is how we "get around" in the wirld. Some might also call it the source of our suffering.

Pharmakon means drug, but as Jacques Derrida and others have pointed out, the word in Greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. It holds both in the bowl.

My wife, I should tell you, is crazy. Not in a requiring-medication-and-wards-and-men-in-white-coats sense— although I sometimes wonder if there may have been times in her past—but in a subtle, more socially acceptable, less ostentatious way. She doesn't think like other people. She believes that to pull a gun on someone lurking, in all likelihood entirely innocently, at our perimeter fence is not only permissible but indeed the right thing to do.