Quotes About Interpretation

We're the ones who fill in the blank spaces. Maybe we can make it different.

A book, to me, is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does.

A book with no pictures lets you make your own pictures in your mind. A guy who writes a book like that really trusts the people who read it to make the kind of pictures he wants them to. Of course he helps them along with the words.

I didn't reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later, with the request "Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver," I'm sure it contained those as well.)

The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does.

Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view?

It indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one's own discomfort for a benefit to another.

The book is not an object on the table; it is an event in the reader's mind. It's a process, through which an idea in my mind triggers an idea, more-or-less corresponding, in yours. The words on the page are merely the means to that end, a think-by-numbers set, a bottled daydream. The book, therefore, is only finished when someone reads it. - Sidelines

Oh, what did she finally decide on? asked the pilot. At one point she told me she was thinking of sending the bride a barbed-wire choke chain for Miles, but was afraid it might be misinterpreted. No

Ah." "And what does ah mean?" he asked, slightly exasperated. "It's sort of like biting my tongue, but less painful.

I figure we can tell events exactly as they happened, just leave out that one tiny detail." "You figure, do you? You must be using a different kind of math than the rest of the universe does.

it indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one's own discomfort for a benefit to another.

Cards that have, in the past, borne the titles Justice, Strength, Temperance, and Judgment (or Last Judgment) are, in the Thoth Tarot, respectively named Adjustment, Lust, Art, and The Aeon. Crowley

Once we remove the cultural framework around the words religion and magic, no objective differences remain.

I've read The Book of the Law. I must be slow. I cannot make heads nor tails of it. Every time I read it, I glean one insight, yet still end up confused. Thanks, Name withheld ………………………… Dear Name withheld, Good! I'd be really worried if you said you understood The Book of the Law. One insight per reading is really a good track record.

I assure you, these ancient mystics would have produced a radically different body of work had they in their wildest nightmares imagined that in some future dark age their secret coded scriptures would be seized by half-witted and sadistic European cannibals and interpreted literally, like some grotesque and racist history book.

No it's better not to make gods or demons smile: they don't laugh at the same jokes as us.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

I feared Sarah was one of those women who instead of laughing said, That's funny, or instead of smiling said, That's interesting, or instead of saying, You are a stupid blithering idiot, said, Well I think it's a little more complicated than that.

Nothing's a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

Nothing is a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.

If God Speaks Through Burning Bushes, Let's Burn Bush and Listen to What God Says.

The proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What the cook takes from the cupboard is not the same thing as what is in the cupboard.