Quotes About Interpretation

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.

Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture, once musician, a veteran of many auditions, says. Other people look awful when they play but sound great. Other people have that belabored look when they play, but you can't hear it in the sound. There is always this dissonance between what you see and hear (p.251).

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness , a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of situation and context.

This is the gift of training and expertise—the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

That's not because journalists know more about Japan. It's because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.

a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.

any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you

there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

This is the price we pay for the many benefits of the locked door. When we ask people to explain their thinking -- particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious -- we need to be careful in how we interpret their answers.

What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity — whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone — has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition.

But testing products or ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation.

And that means when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you're confronting the stranger - because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

Levine argumenta que este é o pressuposto da transparência em ação. Nós tendemos a julgar a honestidade das pessoas baseadas na maneira como se expressam.

There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention.

This could all be a coincidence, of course. Perhaps Chamberlain and his cohort, for whatever private reason, were determined to see the Hitler they wanted to see, regardless of the evidence of their eyes and ears. Except that the same puzzling pattern crops up everywhere.

Malcolm Gladwell

the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. In fact, he makes an even bolder claim—one central to understanding how mind reading works—and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind.

Transparency is the idea that people's behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don't know someone, or can't communicate with them, or don't have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolise the gradual imposition of the Spaniards' conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?

The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. "She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it," he added.