Quotes About Interpretation

Call me cynical, but I have difficulty putting much stock in Christianity, when the entirety of the religion was built upon believing an unmarried fifteen-year-old girl's explanation for how she got pregnant.

Shut up! We can't hear the mimes! —Jacques Prévert Les Enfants du Paradis

This look like college to you?" Malone asks. "You see coeds, Frisbees, man buns? You don't take notes, you don't write anything down. Only thing you ever write are your 5s. Notes you take on duty are discoverable. Some defense attorney shithead will deliberately misinterpret them and ram them up your ass on the stand.

Do you know what history is?" Peter asks. "History?" "Yeah." "I dunno," Frankie says, "it's things that happened." "No," Peter says, "it's what people say happened.

Readers of symbols are forever at the mercy of desire.

Like a lot of painters in this century, you seem to enjoy lifting things out of the world, in this case words or phrases, and then... And then, sung to and Simonized, theyre thrown into the mesh.

One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects.

I think that the effort is to reach a realm of meaning that is not quite sayable. You stay away from what can be said and you try to reach what cant quite be said. Yet it is nevertheless meaningful. And there is such a realm and it is very difficult to talk about. Its not quite nonverbal, but that comes fairly close.

When you improvise, do you think of the chord changes or the melody? Both. This is an interesting question which Im unable to answer adequately. If the melody is the skeleton of the particular object, then the chord changes are its wardrobe, its changes of clothes. I tend to pay rather more attention to the latter than to the former. All I want is just a trace of skeletonthree bones from which the rest may be reasoned out.

I am never needlessly obscure--I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.

We are what we have been told about ourselves. We are the sum of the messages we have received. The true messages. The false messages.

To construct is the essence of vision. Dispense with construction and you dispense with vision. Everything you experience by sight is your construction.

There are as many cubes as there are observers constructing cubes. And when you look away, your cube ceases to be.

A glimpse of an eye is, for purposes of triggering the animate-monitoring system, a glimpse of the beast peering through that eye.

If the government is no longer as good as it once was in providing clear answers, the courts are now there to do so.

Once again the historian who wishes to understand this difficult period must try to read between the lines. It

The law is what is read, not what is written.

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

Through artistry, imagination not only allows one to express their creativity, but also their soul.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

Signs and symbols rule the world, not words nor laws.

The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.

There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.