Quotes About Interpretation

Auntie Yang is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening.

Writing is the witness to myself about myself. Whatever others say of me or how they interpret me is a simulacrum of their own devising.

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.

In the hands of a different reader, the same story can be a different story.

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.

Of cicadas, she would say that they looked like dead leaves fluttering, felt like paper crackling, sounded like fire roaring, smelled like dust rising, and tasted like the devil frying in oil.... You see, in five ways she could sense the world... But it was always the sixth way, her ... sense of importance, that later caused troubles between us. Because her senses led to opinions, and her opinions led to conclusions, and sometimes they were different from mine.

He simply translated what was in LuLing's heart: her better intentions, her hopes.

No one ever asks about the language.

The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The

Isn't the past what people remember- who did what, how and why? And what the people remember, isn't that mostly what they've already chosen to believe?

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the 'I' behind the 'eye' that does the seeing.

The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Didn't the old man know how words carry colors and sounds into the flesh

We don't see things how they are, we see things the way we are.

You know, Lillian, someday I will sit down and write a little dictionary for you, a little Chinese dictionary. In it I will put down all the interpretations of what is said to you, the right interpretation, that is: the one that is not meant to injure, not meant to humiliate or accuse or doubt. And whenever something is said to you, you will look in my little dictionary to make sure, before you get desperate, that you have understood what is said to you.

I have come to the conclusion that the use and knowledge of words acts sometimes as a stumbling block rather than a clarifier.

But I also hate Nietzsche. I wish you would tell me something that would make me understand him. I began with Zarathustra—fatuous language, and the world full of "tougher and merrier" men!

Yet my friend Natasha [Troubetskoia]† swears that Dostoevsky was a great liar and you could hardly find a Nastasia, an "idiot," or a Stavrogin in Russia.

Doubt tortures me. There is a twist in me, my fear of interpretation.

He is dissecting poetry. It has become a cadaver.

No vemos las cosas como son, las vemos como somos