Quotes About Interpretation

Sometimes its like Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to be deep.

What is obscenity? And to whom?

There was no proof that everyone perceived it in the same way; maybe Zulema, Riad Halabí, and others had a different impression of things; maybe they did not see the same colors or hear the same sounds I did. If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation.

It's the remarkable thing about academics: they look at Shakespeare and always see their own faces in him.

Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.

A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.

We make Rizal in our own image and likeness. Our image of Rizal is usually formed or deformed in school through numerous biographies with flattering titles.

Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is. Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable. Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.

Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does.

Christian - One who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.

ALLEGORY, n. A metaphor in three volumes and a tiger.

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

being asked to dinner is not always the same thing as being asked to dine.

LAWFUL, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction. LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

ARGUE, v.t. To tentatively consider with the tongue.

What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.

I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one's imagination.

Monza never had understood why getting out a tit or two made for a better painting. But painters seemed to think it did, so tits is what you got.

A cynic might observe that the scriptures can be used to support both sides of every argument.

History is not the story of battles between right and wrong, but between one man's right and another's. Evil is not the opposite of good. It is what we call another man's notion of good when it differs from ours.

Relief, or disappointment? Hard to tell the difference.