Quotes About Interpretation

For what does it mean to look at something, a real object in the real world, an animal, for example, and say that it is something other than what it is? It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once.

Hikayeler ancak onlar? anlatmas?n? bilenlerin ba??na gelirler.

He wants to say. That is to say, he means. As in the French, 'vouloir dire,' which means, literally, to want to say, but which means, in fact, to mean. He means to say what he wants. He wants to say what he means. He says what he wants to mean. He means what he says.

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, economic history is a deaf man answering questions no economist has put to him.

Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta.

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't.

instead of simply saying, "A rabbi, a priest, and a black guy walk into a bar," he'd say, "The subjects of this joke are three males, two of whom are clergymen, one of the Jewish faith, the other an ordained Catholic minister. The religion of the African-American respondent is undetermined, as is his educational level. The setting for the joke is a licensed establishment where alcohol is served. No, wait. It's a plane.

But that's just me. Others see things differently. My point here is just that the failure of people to attend to data in the political domain does not reflect a limitation in their capacity for reason. It reflects how most people make sense of politics. They don't care about truth because, for them, it's not really about truth.

Empathy is the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does.

The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that "treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.

How is this possible? The answer lies in the human capacity to interpret and respond to experiences. We can be made to feel happy, sad, angry, ashamed, or amused by events in the world, but we can also be made to feel happy, sad, angry, ashamed, or amused by our responses to events in the world.

This is the left hemisphere confabulating. It does this for all of us, every waking moment. It edits our conscious experiences, makes them comprehensible and palatable. It's the brain's spin-doctor.

Monet is only an eye—but what an eye!

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

L'eau changée en vin, le monde changé en peinture. »

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art

I am a consciousness. The landscape thinks itself through me.

If you see a red tree, paint it bright red.

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.

You explain nothing, O poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.

the real is actually the intersubjective meaning arrived at by a community in semiosis. One

Why did he pick me? There were five other laps present, all of them more friendly than mine. It's that sort of coincidental behavior of cats that upsets people. It raises the question: did he know I was the guy who had to be won over? But won over to what?