Quotes About Interpretation

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...

Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow?

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

If we had in this room a hundred teachers, good teachers from good schools, and asked them to define the word education, there would be very little general agreement.

Inconceivable!" "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I've been saying it so long to you, you just wouldn't listen. Every time you said 'Farm Boy do this' you thought I was answering 'As you wish' but that's only because you were hearing wrong. 'I love you' was what it was, but you never heard.

Christian, hath not God secretly instructed thee by his Spirit from the Word, how to read the shorthand of his providence? Dost

The Spirit is the only true interpreter of the word. Hence that known passage of Bernard: quo spiritu factæ sunt Scripturæ, eo spiritu legi desi derant, ipso etiam intelligendæ sunt—the Scriptures must be read, and can be understood, by that Spirit alone by whom they were made.

What is said of some commentators, 'The places on which they treat were plain till they expounded them,' may be said of some preachers, their text was clear till their obscure dis course upon it darkened it.

reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.

A book is like a deck of windows

Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time….. If you believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself with very little belief." On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in "Fifty Literary Pillars".

Seldom was blue for blue's sake present till Pollock hurled pigment at his canvas like pies.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

When book and reader's furrowed brow meet, it isn't always the book that's stupid.

If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope. All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.28 And

Someday someone is going to create a stir by proposing a radical new tool for the study people. It will be called the face-value technique. It would be based on the premise that people often do what they do for the reasons they think they do. The use of this technique will lead to many pitfalls, for it is undeniably true that people do not always act logically or say what they mean. But I wonder if it would produce findings any more unscientific than the opposite course.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.

Hamlet is a name: his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet's brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality is in the reader's mind. It is we who are Hamlet.

If I have not read a book before, it is, to all intents and purposes, new to me, whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.