Quotes About Interpretation

no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.

Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.

La lectura debería ser un acto de creación, como el escribir.

When she said to him once It looks as if it was painted! it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.

In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women's faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?

She stared, perhaps suspecting irony, as she always did beneath the unintelligible.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even though but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs

If ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire those writers or artists, Livy and Virgil for instance, Raphael or Michael Angelo, whom all the learned had admired, [we ought] not to follow our own fancies, but to study them until we know how and what we ought to admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull, than that the rest of the world has been imposed on.

A]rt can never give the rules that make an art.

the most trenchant commentary was

When history gives out, fiction takes over.

The French word for "plot," trame , also means "heft" or "weave.

Youngsters can plunder a text and find what they want in the margins.

No two people ever read the same book.

Good writers define reality Bad ones merely restate it.

Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the critic will seize on some little aspect that he or she understands and tackle only that.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

Anyway, for whatever interest is to be derived therefrom. Bacon, Balthus, and Magritte are my three favourite painters, along with Dubuffet, of the whole post-impressionist period, by which I mean that before them Bonnard, Vuillard, & Seurat are my favourite painters of that time.

The Baron told her that only art meant anything.