Quotes About Interpretation

It's so warm it's almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I've never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It's never sentimental. It's generous, but it's sardonic too. And whenever it's sardonic, a moment later it's generous again.

It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.

It was kindly meant. But kindly meant was complicated. There were lines you had to draw. There were correct responses. On the one hand there was laugh and say something funny back, on the other there was how dare you talk to me like that. It depended.

Els punts i final ens agraden: les simetries, trobar sentit al que no en té -¿és potser aquesta, la gran tasca de la literatura: explicar-nos el món per fer-nos creure que té sentit?

The world is full of people looking for meaning in the shape of a bird not native to this country turning up in this country after all.

She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it.

After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they're stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing's a performance. Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you'd made, as if the thing you'd made became you.

And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?

H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse.

Everything means something quite other now.

most people interpret silence as rejection!

Know thyself, for in thyself is to be found all that there is to be known," is still the rule for the wise student. If each one of us would scientifically regard ourselves as centres of force, holding the matter of our bodies within our radius of control, and thus working through and in them, we should have a hypothesis whereby the entire cosmic scheme could be interpreted.

In our era, it is because poetry is no longer practiced that some people can rediscover it in argot, in which the part of poetry remains small. Metaphors are to argot what the image of the Gypsy is to the Gypsy

Maeniel felt this was why all the great sages never wrote anything down. In the final analysis, scriptures are futile things, dependent as they are on the intentions of the interpreter. All too often too literal a mind can lead human students into strange follies. Sometimes it is better to allow the searchers to try to plumb the depths of the great mystery on their own and accept that not every one of those taking the road will see the same end.

Schoolteachers can be some hard-eyed people, with talkin eyes; they mouth sayin one thing and them eyes be screamin another.

They pick all of us out, and then they decide, they computerize, decide if they like it or don't like it, and then they go home, and then they come back again because they're not sure what they saw.

Each poet creates an expatriate space, a slightly skewed domain where things are freshly felt because they are freshly said.

Here's the thing about luck...you don't know if it's good or bad until you have some perspective.

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, 'don't confuse any of this literary theory with your lives'—how we hadn't believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.

Top tip 4: Somtimes you're lying when you say nothing at all

The slavery debate alerts us to self-justifying tendencies at work in how we use the Bible. Whenever our interpretation leads to injustice, oppression, or structural violence, then the very heart of the Bible is repudiated. Such views are anti-biblical, no matter what texts they cite.

when someone reads poems I exist to be the one who's feeling it.

because you already know what I mean. You read my mind.