Quotes About Interpretation

Fine art is the only teacher except torture.

It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each others meaning.

My teacher has a reading problem. He can't read my writing

They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing."

A picture is worth a thousand words. An interface is worth a thousand pictures.

Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being.

to listen to him was a venture of collaboration, in which the things that were spoken of came gradually to be transformed into artefacts of a shared imagining.

History is notoriously not about the past.

Era talvez meu hábito 'profissional' de colocar-me no lugar, ou na pele, dos outros. Isso não significa que sempre justifico esses outros, mas que tenho a capacidade de enxergar seus pontos de vista p. 95.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

Cuando crezcas te darás cuenta de que casi todo lo que se oye por la noche puede interpretarse de diversas formas. Y de hecho, no sólo por la noche y no sólo lo que se oye: también lo que se ve, e incluso lo que se ve a plena luz del día, puede casi siempre entenderse de muchas formas.

To write about things that exist, to try to capture a color or smell or sound in words, is a little like playing Schubert when Schubert is sitting in the hall, and perhaps sniggering in the darkness.

Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

For all we know, the handwriting might have been on the wall all along. The question is: was the ink invisible?

A person's face goes in your eyes and down you arms and into your fingers, and that's how you draw.

The striking part of his communication is what he doesn't say, when saying something would make a difference.

I always got the words pedestrian and Presbyterian confused. I didn't understand why Presbyterians always had the right of way.

They don't see what they're doing. The only thing they see are their intentions.

Without stories, we'd have even more trouble recognizing what's real.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more.

Lack of clarity is a writer's truth.

I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.