Quotes About Interpretation

She had eyes that Rembrandt would have painted.

satellite view. "They could

THEY SAT LOOKING at the pictures for a few seconds, then Sloan said

other story. The drawings have gotta

Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky - blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass.

A battalion was apparently a mid-level unit, in size, and his particular battalion had apparently been deeply enmeshed in combat in Iraq. Dannon had gotten good efficiency marks, but Lucas wasn't sure how exactly to evaluate them. In his own bureaucracy, good efficiency marks were subject to interpretation by insiders, and could damn with praise a little too faint.

Q'eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of "I offer you the bread of life," but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into "Let us violate cakes together.

Lies do not in themselves lead to poor outcomes, nor does truth in every circumstance lead to good ones. As with so many things, context matters.

The answer to that is complicated." "Give me the short version." "The short version is 'Yes, but.' The slightly longer version is 'No, and.' Which version would you like?

Ultimately, people write to be understood (excepting Gertrude Stein and Tristan Tzara, who were intentionally being difficult).

The short version is 'Yes, but.' The slightly longer version is 'No, and.' Which version would you like?

In ground forces, when someone does you a favor you tell them you owe them a sex act. If it's a little thing, it's a handjob. Medium, blowjob. Big favor, you owe them a fuck. Force of habit. It's just an expression. Got it, Dahl said. No actual blowjob forthcoming, Duvall said. To be clear. It's the thought that counts.

How much?" Patz said nothing but gave Kiva a look that she interpreted as saying a whole fuckton.

I'm guessing you thought I was way off on your political philosophy but right on the button about the other two. Just think about that for a while.

basing an entire system of social, political and economic control on the vague, all-too-easily misinterpreted words of a single person claiming divine inspiration is probably not actually all that smart, now, is it.

So you see, a man's history when other folks tell it is a pitiful confusion.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn't necessarily a lie even if it didn't necessarily happen.

The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer's own experience.

I eat stories like grapes.