Quotes About Interpretation

There's a very thin line that separates readers and writers. You make a leap over that line when there's a book you want to read and you can't find it and you have to write it yourself.

The author P. L. Travers once said, 'A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

History is personal . . . All that you are seeing is what's before you, the rest is guesswork.

Is there more to the story?" Vincent asked. "There's more to every story," his aunt told him.

unless you allowed them to mean something.

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

No wonder that afterward Lynn told anyone within earshot that she now believed it was impossible ever to divine a person's truest nature. Eric Herman, on the other hand, was not really surprised at Betsy's sudden departure. He had seen the way she'd looked at lightening.

P. L. Travers once said, 'A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?

Now I no longer believe that people's secrets are defined and communicable, or their feelings full-blown and easy to recognize.

I don't take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house. Alice Munro on reading.

I could see a nostril, an ear, plugged up with greenish mud. . . . I don't think I really saw all this. . . . I must have heard someone talking about that and imagined that I saw it.

She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.

She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.

They tried to explain to the missionaries that it was they who put Adam and Eve out of the village because they was naked. Their word for naked is white. But since they are covered by color they are not naked. They said anybody looking at a white person can tell naked, but black people can not be naked because they can not be white.

I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after.

so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That's why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb's wool. Lamb's wool is not straight, Celie. It isn't even curly.

He understands that creating a meal means creating your own reality...

All responses to the world take place within our bodies. - Gloria Anzaldua

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.

Tudor historians were adept at rewriting history.

El lenguaje del cuerpo es más fácil de fingir frente a hombres que frente a mujeres porque, en general, los hombres no saben interpretar muy bien el lenguaje del cuerpo.

He'd told her about his asphalt water lilies and his sidewalk Van Goghs

He could explain away the mechanical, but the inner workings of the soul eluded him