Quotes About Interpretation

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?

every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales (...)

They are the Eggheads. He is the Walrus.

These stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.

Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.

one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing also to accept that, had one been standing next to the Prophet of Islam on Mount Hira that day, one would also have seen the Archangel.

Literature is disputed territory.

Every quest takes places in both the sphere of the actual, which is what maps reveal to us, and in the sphere of the symbolic, for which the only maps are the unseen ones in our heads.

From 'The Suicide', a play by the Russian writer Nikolai Erdman: 'Only the dead can say what the living are thinking.

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in mysterious ways: men say.

Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves we. We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

Bir toplumun kilidini açmak istiyorsan?z, tercüme edilemeyen kelimelerine bak?n.

The true story is there's no true story any more. There's no true any more that anyone can agree on.

The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

la memoria es verdad, porque la memoria tiene su forma de ser especial. Selecciona, elimina, altera, exagera, minimiza, glorifica, y difama también; pero, en definitiva, crea su propia realidad, su versión heterogénea pero normalmente coherente de los acontecimientos; y ningún hombre en su sano juicio confía más

Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay "Wulgate": And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn't he make the car? And why not a better car, Daddy? He could've asked for a Jesus Chrysler, no?

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return

But it was Genesis that got him, the Vulgate that was his namesake Saint Jerome's work. Genesis, especially chapter one, verse three. Dixitque Deus: fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Translated by himself into his personal Bombay "Wulgate": And God said, Cheap Italian motor car, beauty soap of the film star. And there was Lux. Please, Daddy, why did God want a small Fiat and a bar of soap, and also please, why did he get the soap only? Why couldn't he make the car?

Verhalen zijn niet waar, maar doordat ze onwaar zijn kunnen ze waarheden voelbaar en kenbaar maken die de waarheid niet kan vertellen.

Rani, too, was perpetuating memories. Harappa the martyr, the demigod, lived on in his daughter's thoughts; but no two sets of memories ever match, even when their subject is the same (...)

It is a true desire of every artist to impose his or her vision on the world