Quotes About Interpretation

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

It is hard for anyone to read with understanding what one takes to be wrong or wrong-headed.

The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.

Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator's unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator. Unreliably

But what is the point of tiring oneself over words that are being used from two quite different points of view? One should instead rely on the meaning intended.

His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.

You can teel does a fellow like you with a spear of grass, did you know that?" "How do you tell?" "You wave it under his chin, and if his face goes red at all, then you know.

When Louise worried bout something, it often turned up in her art.

What had happened could not be interpreted any other way.

To make a photo from what we see is easy, but to create a realistic photo and show others what we have in our mind is a completely different story.

I cannot write the way some persons want to read my writings, my thoughts of mind do the job.

No two persons every read the same book.—Edmund Wilson "Nor does any one person ever reread the same book!

We tend to listen to Mozart with ears trained by Beethoven, and that's not the best way to listen to Mozart.

I've been doing the hotel accounting long enough to know that two and two equals whatever you want it to be. It's simply a matter of perception and misdirection.

When you're sixteen or seventeen meaning can be anywhere. A drop of rain running down the window is a symbol, a song comes on the radio just when you longed for it, you have the same initials as the boy for whom you're sick, secret messages await you in poems. It's like living in a net of logic, of systems of words and significance.

I have not the pleasure of understanding you.

But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

M. Jacques Rivière appears to know no Russian and says no words of 'aspects', but what he explains as his meaning is simply this, that the Russian novel is written in the imperfective, written from within not without, lived not thought about. This modern Russian method is to M. Rivière the exact opposite of symbolist work, where everything is known beforehand, everything achieved then thought or felt about from outside and above.

If I could have my life over again, I would devote it not to art or literature, but to language. Life itself may hit one hard, but always, always one can take sanctuary in language. Language is as much an art and as sure a refuge as paint¬ ing or music or literature. It reflects and interprets and makes bearable life; only it is a wider, because more subconscious, life.

By a false etymology they explained the word Dithyrambos as meaning "He of the double door," their word thyra being the same as our door.

I have had a suspicion all my life that in the current dictionaries and grammars often the real explanation and origin of a word or a grammatical form is to be found in something that comes in just at the end as a 'derived' form or 'exceptional' use. This I believe to be the case with the aorist; the true primitive essential aorist I believe to be the gnomic, the temporal aorist a later derivative, in fact the aorist I believe to be primarily not a tense at all but an aspect.

You don't need to," he replied. "You're already saved." And he went on to tell me that the original Greek meaning of the word saved meant that a person was whole.