Quotes About Interpretation

What is clearest, most memorable and important about art is its coming into being, and the world's best works of art, while telling of very diverse matters, are really telling about their birth.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

What common language to unravel?

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

An expert is a man who tells you a simple thing in a confused way in such a fashion as to make you think the confusion is your own fault.

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.

Blind unbelief is sure to err And scan His work in vain; God is His own interpreter, And He will make it plain.

Much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain.

As the Italian proverb says, 'Translators are traitors.' At some level we all are traitors to the text, saying a little less than the Greek says (thus leaving some meaning behind) or a little more (when trying to clarify). Under- and over-translation. A good reason to learn Greek and Hebrew, and an even better reason to read more than one translation.

Rama-fication' of Hinduism.

So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him.

Imagine then, by miracle, with me,(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)What could not possibly be there,And learn a style from a despair.

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own

it is an obvious bit of interpretation to say that the Queen of Hearts is a symbol of "uncontrolled animal passion" seen through the clear but blank eyes of sexlessness; obvious, and the sort of thing critics are now so sure would be in bad taste; Dodgson said it himself, to the actress who took the part when the thing was acted.

All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.

An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.

the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.

As for the immediate importance of the study of ambiguity, it would be easy enough to take up an alarmist attitude, and say that the English language needs nursing by the analyst very badly indeed. Always rich and dishevelled, it is fast becoming very rich and dishevelled…

Thus a poetical word is a thing conceived in itself and includes all its meanings; a prosaic word is flat and useful and might have been used differently.

The next time you try to seduce anyone, don't do it with talk, with words. Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

We are what we myth.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of...recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it...