Quotes About Interpretation

This is perhaps what has made some suspect that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was really a banana.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.

All writers recognize this surge of striking; in its energies the objects of the world are made new, alchemized by their passage through the imaginal, musical, world-foraging and word-forging mind. This altered vision is the secret happiness of poems, of poets. It is as if the poem encounters the world and finds in it a hidden language, a Braille unreadable except when raised by the awakened imaginative mind.

Art can be defined as beauty able to transcend the circumstances of its making.

words used wrong are like poison.

Dreaming or awake, we perceive only events that have meaning to us.

English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

History is what people want to remember.

We evoke the world we perceive.

What is reality, anyway Just a collective hunch.

I think of the irony that in our language [Nepali] the word for love can also mean deceit.

Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.

Things weren't real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you'd have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

And poor Noeline, who was waiting for Dr. Howell to propose to her although the only words he had even spoken to her were How are you? Do you know where you are? Do you know why you are here? — phrases which ordinarily would be hard to interpret as evidence of affection. But when you are sick you find yourself a new field of perception where you make a harvest of interpretations which then provide you with your daily bread, your only food.

No word is absolutely wrong or dirty or insulting. It all depends upon context and intention.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us.

The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them.

That is --- we think differently, we now and then see things differently...--- Those who tell their own story you know must be listened to with caution.---

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own.