Quotes About Interpretation

We had chosen as our next book club selection Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, as we'd both loved her 2003 novel The Namesake and her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which had won the Pulitzer in 1999.

The world we experience as 'out there' is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It's an act of creation by the storytelling brain.

is a 'story processor', writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, 'not a logic processor'.

And every now and then people find the bugs, and they interpret those as cool failures in the Sims terms. For them it's like a treasure hunt, you know.

In art one idea is as good as another.

Een boek is voor hem [C. Buddingh'] zo iets als een rommelwinkel voor andere koopjesjagers. Je vindt hier en daar wat moois, een aardig vaasje, een raar plaatje, maar de winkelvoorraad als geheel interesseert je geen zier. Zo leest Kees boeken. Hij pikt er zinnetjes uit, zoals een kind snot uit z'n neus peutert en smakelijk opeet, zonder te weten hoe het is ontstaan, zonder zich in de functie van slijmvliezen en de ademhaling te verdiepen, zonder iets te begrijpen van de totale mens, hè.

You're a true poet: but, my dear, If you would hold the public ear, Remember to be not too clear. Be strange, be verbally intense; Words matter ten times more than sense; In clear streams, under sunny skies, The fish you angle for won't rise; In turbid water, cloudy weather, They'll rush to you by shoals together.

what upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things."3 Seneca shared this view—"It is not how the wrong is done that matters, but how it is taken

depth. It is not, however, events either past or present which make us feel the way we feel, but our interpretation of those events. Our feelings

And when a futurist dies, the tragedy is that we lose access to all the possible futures they imagined for us. Our only connection, afterward, is through the arcane procedure like literary interpretation, like reading the flight of birds or throwing the I Ching, as Ballard must have as a child in Shanghai. Like it or not, we live in one of Ballard's futures; a little apocalyptic, bent by technology.

Not even God can teach a man who comes to the Bible with his mind made up.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation.

If words happen to be still dubious, we may establish their meaning from the context; with which it may be of singular use to compare a word, or a sentence, whenever they are ambiguous, equivocal, or intricate.

The most universal and effectual way of discovering the true meaning of a law, when the words are dubious, is by considering the reason and spirit of it.

What seems to be, is, to those to whom it seems to be, and is productive of the most dreadful consequences to those to whom it seems to be, even of torments, despair, eternal death.

Both read the Bible day and night,But thou read'st black where I read white.

Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read'st black while I read white.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

None can imitate life without the intermediary of art.

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

You know what the Englishman's idea of compromise is? He says, Some people say there is a God. Some people say there is no God. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two statements.

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.