Quotes About Interpretation

All men have the stars, but they do not mean the same things for different people. For some they are guides, for others, no more than little lights in the sky. But all these are silent. You--you alone have the stars as no one else has them

D'autre part la langue écrite, la langue littéraire, surchargée, pompeuse, pâteuse, prétentieuse, gorgée de digressions ineptes, absconse, évasive, allusive, ne réussissait qu'à lui transmettre un vilain bruit et de vilaines évidences très mal formulées (Black Village p. 123)

What about the way he tried to raise his arm while looking at Jeff? Did he remember that? What had he been trying to do? Signal? Beckon? Acknowledge? Thank? Even if everything that had happened at the beach was a blur, or a blank, Jeff had no doubt that somewhere in that man lingered a remnant of that canceled gesture.

You listened so patiently. I suppose I want to know. What do you think? You did what anyone would have done, I said. It was the closest thing to a benediction I could offer. The fact that I didn't think it true, didn't make a difference.

You don't understand at all. It doesn't matter what's true and what's a fairy tale. That's not what matters. The dividing lines aren't as straight and simple as you think. - Raka

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.

If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

designed to fill the interstices of constitutional text."43 Thus is born, out of false linguistic association, a whole new field of legal inquiry.

noscitur a sociis

some authorities use this canon at that broad level of generality.1 But we mean something more specific. When several nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs—any words—are associated in a context suggesting that the words have something in common, they should be assigned a permissible meaning that makes them similar.

the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.

So unless the text itself is ambiguous, the parol-evidence rule excludes precontractual indications of what the parties thought they were achieving.

It can convert nouns into verbs, and change a description of a panda bear ("Eats shoots and leaves") into a description of Jesse James ("Eats, shoots, and leaves"). No intelligent construction of a text can ignore its punctuation.

In statutory interpretation there is, for example, the rule of lenity, whereby ambiguity in a criminal law is resolved in favor of the defendant; and in interpretation of private contracts there is the rule that ambiguity will be construed contra proferentem, against the party that drafted the instrument.

A traditional and hence anticipated rule of interpretation, no less than a traditional and hence anticipated meaning of a word, imparts meaning.

For example, post can refer to a piece of timber set upright, a position of employment, or mail.

But more often the language is not plain and unambiguous, so that to figure out its meaning, the implicit process of interpretation that we apply to plain and unambiguous language must be made express.

conveying two very different senses, as when table could refer either to a piece of furniture or to a numerical chart)

As Justinian's Digest put it: A verbis legis non est recedendum1 ("Do not depart from the words of the law").

Second, the purpose must be defined precisely, and not in a fashion that smuggles in the answer to the question before the decision-maker.

fair reading": determining the application of a governing text to given facts on the basis of how a reasonable reader, fully competent in the language, would have understood the text at the time it was issued. The endeavor requires aptitude in language, sound judgment, the suppression of personal preferences regarding the outcome, and, with older texts, historical linguistic research.

The last-antecedent canon may be superseded by another grammatical convention: A pronoun that is the subject of a sentence and does not have an antecedent in that sentence ordinarily refers to the subject of the preceding sentence. And it almost always does so when it is the word that begins the sentence.

It was with characteristic foresight that George Washington declared: "I have always been persuaded, that the stability and success of the National Government and consequently the happiness of the people of the United States, would depend, in a considerable degree, on the interpretation and execution of its laws.