Quotes About Interpretation

Nous sentons très bien que notre sagesse commence où celle de l'auteur finit, et nous voudrions qu'il nous donnât des réponses, quand tout ce qu'il peut faire est de nous donner des désirs.

The end of a book's wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own, so that at the moment when the book has told us everything it can, it gives rise to the feeling that it has told us nothing.

for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides,

Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.

The impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression.

But when it comes to the disconcerting actions of our fellow-men, we rarely discover their motives.

Não advertia que aquele detalhe verdadeiro tinha ângulos que só podiam encaixar-se nos detalhes contíguos do fato verdadeiro de que imprudentemente o destacara e que, quaisquer que fossem os detalhes inventados entre os quais o colocasse, sempre revelariam, pela matéria excedente e os vazios não preenchidos, que não era ali o seu lugar.

O que chamamos nossa conduta permanece ignorado de nosso mais próximo vizinho; o que esquecemos haver dito, ou que até nunca dissemos, vai provocar hilaridade até num outro planeta, e a imagem que os outros formam de nossos gestos e atitudes tampouco se parece com a que nós próprios formamos, como um desenho, um decalque malfeito, e onde ora a um traço negro corresponde um espaço vazio, e a um branco, um contorno inexplicável.

Bressant's voice or of Thiron's in L'Aventurière or in the Gendre de M. Poirier.

Et elle m'a répondu textuellement : « Il faut toujours dire une chose comme si on était en train de la composer soi-même. » Si vous y réfléchissez c'est monumental, cette réponse !

Ogni lettore, quando legge, legge se stesso.

And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil's works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world.

Na realidade, todo leitor é, quando lê, o leitor de si mesmo. A obra não passa de uma especie de instrumento óptico oferecido ao leitor a fim de lhe ser possível discernir o que, sem ela, não teria certamente visto em si mesmo. O reconhecimento, por seu foro íntimo, do que diz o livro, é a prova da verdade deste [...].

putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monuments—so many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth.

This was indeed what was meant by nobility, by intelligence of diction. Now I could appreciate the merits of a broad, poetical, powerful interpretation, or rather it was to this that those epithets were conventionally applied, but only as we give the names of mars, venus, saturn to planets which have nothing mythological about them. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the gap

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go to look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

For the very ones who are right, like Françoise, have also to be wrong, so that Justice becomes an impossibility

He had always found a peculiar fascination in tracing in the paintings of the Old Masters, not merely the general characteristics of the people whom he encountered in his daily life, but rather what seems least susceptible of generalisation, the individual features of men and women whom he knew,

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself.

The peculiar tendency which he had always had to look for analogies between living people and the portraits in galleries reasserted itself here,

Ah! there is a man who justifies the wit who insisted that one ought never to know an author except through his books.

Literature itself is a species of code. You line up symbols and create a simulacrum of life.

Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?