Quotes About Interpretation

Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words.

I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests.

Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo.

Mi ero accorta da tempo che ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene, tuttora mi sorprendo a farlo anch'io

The 'right reading' is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we've read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we've truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules.

Why did she talk to me about how soles were ground and not about what she read?

Translators transport nations into other nations. They are the first to reckon with distant modes of feeling. Even their mistakes are evidence of a positive force. Translation is our salvation. It draws us out of the well in which, entirely by chance, we are born.

En las conversaciones con mis hijas oigo palabras o frases no pronunciadas. Ellas a veces se enojan, me dicen mamá, yo no lo he dicho, lo estás diciendo tú, te lo has inventado. Pero no invento nada, me basta con escuchar, lo no dicho es más elocuente que lo dicho.

In conversations with my daughters I hear omitted words or phrases. Sometimes they get mad, they say Mama, I never said that, you're saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.

What I expect from a good story is that it will tell me today what I can't know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.

Ognuno si racconta la vita come gli fa comodo».

Ognuno si organizza la memoria come gli conviene.

Only she can say if, in fact, she has managed to insert herself into this extremely long chain of words to modify my text, to purposely supply the missing links, to unhook others without letting it show, to say of me more than I want, more than I'm able to say.

In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn't mean that the singer has changed.

they say Mama, I never said that, you're saying it, you invented it. But I invent nothing; you just have to listen—the unspoken says more than the spoken.

Si fermò in tempo ma non abbastanza perché non capissi: fu come quando uno fa cenno di volerti dare uno schiaffo e poi non te lo dà.

Mas eu não invento nada, só escuto, o não dito fala mais do que o dito.

Há tempos eu já percebera que cada um organiza a memória como lhe convém, e ainda hoje me surpreendo ao fazer o mesmo.

I had long since realized that each of us organizes memory as it suits him, I'm still surprised when I do it myself. But it surprised me that one could go so far as to give the facts an arrangement that went against one's own interests.

How and when words escape from books and the books end up seeming like empty graves is something to think about.

Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words--the written form in which we enclose them, attentive to the red margins of our notebooks--are not. We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned.

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning? So she began to disparage all that struggle of mine to write. She said mockingly: Is the meaning that line of black markings that look like insect shit?

Cada um conta a própria vida como acha melhor.

Each of us narrates our life as it suits us.