Quotes About Interpretation

We are incessant narrators of stories about almost anything in our lives, mostly about the important things but not only, and we happily color our narratives with all the biases of our past experiences and of our likes and dislikes. There is nothing fair and neutral about our narratives unless we go to the effort of reducing our preferences and prejudices, which we are well advised to do on things that matter for our lives and the lives of others.

You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

Of all forms of commentary on the divine Word, a translation is the most subtle.

Milton S. Terry, for example, author of one of the most conservative textbooks on hermeneutics (1890), begins: "Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation."4 Yet even Terry concedes that hermeneutics "is both a science and an art. As a science it enunciates principles . . . and classifies the facts and results. As an art, it teaches what application these principles should have . . . showing their practical value in the elucidation of more difficult scriptures.

Look at it this way: You see persons and things not as they are but as you are. If you wish to see them as they are you must attend to your attachments and the fears that your attachments generate.

We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. That is why when two people look at something or someone, you get two different reactions. We see things and people not as they are, but as we are.

Terrific or terrifying, depending on your point of view.

Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

Each story Werner hears contains its own flaws and contradictions, as though the truth is a machine whose gears are not meshing.

As I work on yet another draft of my story, I try to remember these lessons. A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story—a finished piece of writing—is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world—the one particular world of the story, which

Sie denkt: Sie sagen einfach nur Worte und was sind Worte anderes als Geräusche, die diese Männer aus Atem formen, gewichtslose Dämpfe, die sie in die Küchenluft schicken, wo sie sich auflösen und sterben.

She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

Sabe a maior lição da história? A história é aquilo que os vitoriosos determinam. Eis a lição. Seja qual for o vencedor, ele é quem decide a história.

GUARDIAN #2: Though it will seem simple at first, it's actually quite complicated. GUARDIAN #1: No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple. GUARDIAN #2: Ready, little crow? Here's our riddle. "He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this.

There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inaccurate

A is ???? is alpha: the inverted head of an ox. ? is ???? is beta: based on the floor plan of a house. ? is ? ???? is omega, the mega O: a great whale's mouth opening to swallow all the letters before it.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name a person or nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.