Quotes About Interpretation

Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about.

Remember—all system diagrams are simplifications of the real world.

The world peeps, squawks, bangs, and thunders at many frequencies all at once. What is a significant delay depends—usually—on which set of frequencies you're trying to understand.

Vision involves more than just seeing or being shown.

I devised a list of things I needed to accomplish, all of them related to the Survival Kit and my mother. I was no longer going in any particular order or interpreting my tasks so literally and narrowly. They took on a life of their own, a life that I was giving them now.

Our brains construct a world that no one else can see, touch, or hear. Or, as Buddhist teachers sometimes say, "The truth is a pathless land.

I think reading a translation is an act of faith.

Why did Erasmus[…] transform the image of a woman yielding to the temptation of an enormous storage jar into the image of a woman carrying with her a small pyxis [box] ?" Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The changing aspects of a Mythical Symbol, p. 18

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so ' reducing it to a simple formula.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

because a book lets your imagination soar and a movie makes all the decisions for you. A book is almost always, but not always, a far richer experience than a book turned into a movie.

You can write about anything which has been vivid enough to cause you to comment upon it." If a situation has caught your attention to that extent, it has meaning for you, and if you can find what that meaning is, you have the basis for a story.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

Silence isn't always golden; sometimes it's just yellow.

Ancient texts, he believed, could illuminate customary practices in his own times; conversely, current practices influenced his interpretation of the classics.

Don't look at me in that tone of voice.

Don't look at me in that tone of voice.

Children are like poems. They're beautiful -- to their creators -- but to others they're just silly and fucking annoying.

She sighed audibly. 'I bet this is something to do with the bloody magazine.' 'Fanzine. It's not a magazine, it's a fa-' 'I don't

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.