Quotes About Interpretation

The evidence should guide you to a theory; you should not be allowing the theory to guide the evidence upon which you focus.

The biggest problem with communication is the assumption that it has taken place.

Therefore, we need to choose the right medium for our message, remembering that face-to-face communication is the richest form because we can draw on the resources of words, body language, voice, or even the physical arena itself to deliver our ideas. At the same time, we can receive a constant update on how the audience is receiving our message and can make midcourse corrections if we're going astray.

George Bernard Shaw summed it up well when he observed that the biggest problem with communication is the assumption that it has taken place.

I've learned to write the truth. But to do that, I had to figure out what the truth was-and I had to realize that the truth isn't always the same for everyone. I had to realize that my truth may not be the same as your truth.

in the absence of feedback, people will fill in the blanks with a negative. They

His intelligence seized on a subject, his genius embraced it, his eloquence illuminated it.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

Take a good look at your fabric and intuit what it is saying to you.

The camera is an instrument of detection…we photograph what we know and what we don't know… when I point my camera at something I am asking a question and the photograph is sometimes an answer… In other words, I am not trying to prove anything. I am the one who is getting the lesson.

It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it.

If fourteen people believe they were Cleopatra in a former life, does that mean that Cleopatra had split personality disorder?

I don't wear a cross. As a child, I'd had a bad experience with one. Besides, a crucifix was the instrument of Our Lord's death- I don't know why people think a torture device should be a symbol of Christ. Christ was a willing sacrifice, a lamb, not a cross for us to hang ourselves on; or at least that's my interpretation. Maybe other people think of religion and God differently than I do.

Body language, when you know how to read it, can be more expressive than speech. (Mercy)

Many, if not most, of the best and most lasting children's books have multiple levels, some of which are not fully accessible to their most likely readers…at least, not on their first read-through at age eight or ten or fifteen.

Nothing you will object to," James replied in a soothing tone. I cannot think how he came to imagine that he would know what I might or might not object to.

That is certainly one way to look at the matter. There are others.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

First and foremost, we need to acknowledge we are not our ego-based interpretation of ourselves but the Spirit beyond it, and so much more powerful than we even know.

Dogs speak words, but only poets and children Hear.

All stories are true. The truth is the journey you take from it - did it make you laugh, cry, or seek and want justice? Then it's true.

Drawing is what you see of the world, truly see...And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are...that's the world, isn't it? You have to keep looking to find the truth.

And sometimes what you see is so deep in your head you're not even sure of what you're seeing. But when it's down there on paper, and you look at it, really look, you'll see the way things are.

But you have poetry, you say. And if you can tell me what poetry is, where the line is drawn between the beauty and the breathing of breath into something to make it beautiful, I will claim poetry as my own."-Patricia Smith