Quotes About Interpretation

You don't get it, god-bothered dude!

When you read a book, and who you are when you read it, makes it matter or not.

She also knew that the story you made up in your mind was rarely the real story.

A classroom of students may read the same piece of poetry or the same passage in a novel, and each person may interpret it differently.

what you put out there and what people take away are two totally separate things. People's minds process things in diverse ways. Everyone lives in different worlds, which is sort of sad but also has potential if you can work out how to turn it to your advantage.

And now the Marquis, who interpreted her silence into a secret compliance with his proposal, resumed all his gaiety and spirit, while the long and ardent regards he bestowed on Adeline, overcame her with confusion and indignation.

While we need to look deeply into the Scriptures Jesus knew, we needn't look beyond them for things that aren't there.

When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.

People can't just listen to the music and have their own imagination and take them where they wanna go.

Literature is an act which gives meaning to experience.

Symbolism, originally intended as a countermovement to naturalism, actually turned out to be a variation of it rather than its antithesis.

Not that she could see, but it was unmistakable not to hear what he looked like.

She did horror stories on herself, filling in blanks where I refused to supply information. This meant she wrote the entire script herself.

Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.

The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance

There is an art, a deeply political art, of taking circumstances as they arise and attributing them to your side or the opposition, in a constant tallying of reality towards ends of which it is innocent.

Jeff and I signed a Jewish marriage contract, a ketubah, promising to cherish each other in the "way that Jewish men and women had cherished each other through the ages." This probably doesn't refer to King Solomon, who reportedly had 700 hundred wives and 300 concubines but much of the document was written in Hebrew so we really have no idea what we agreed to.

For a moment, Meg couldn't think, could barely breathe as a drawing of a cow with arrows pointing to the various cuts of meat popped into her head. Then she imagined a drawing of a human with the same kinds of arrows. Could there be a sign like that in the butcher shop?

No one else has the right to decide if or when we cut our skin, but if we don't learn to interpret the warning signs that tell us if we really need to cut, we can become the enslavers as well as the enslaved. We can become our own enemy.

Why is the moon shaped like that?" he asked. "It's a heart," Meg replied. "Haven't you seen this symbol before?" "Sure. But it's not the thumpy-thump good-eating kind of heart." "It's a romantic heart." She looked up and narrowed her eyes. "Is that why you shelved the kissy books with the cookbooks? Because a heart is a heart?

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it.

Some conversations are not about what they're about.

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.