Quotes About Interpretation

A silent observer in the early morning could mean many things, for a prisoner, and none likely to her benefit.

She smiled, and I couldn't tell if she was fairly to take my meaning or failing to take my meaning on purpose, or just didn't consider it the insult I had intended it to be. Actually she looked like she was taking it as a compliment, and I wished I'd kept my mouth shut.

If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is in your eye.

The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little, even if one did once know what one meant.

While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.

made articulate seemed to

What is it exactly," she asked, "that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

And what is truth, since it changes according to each individual's perception?

I wonder why you see him and I hear him," Will said. "You hear him?" Ivy reached over and switched off the motor. "You hear him?" "So does Beth." Ivy's mouth dropped open. "She writes stories with messages that aren't hers. I draw angels I don't mean to draw.

You guys writing on Bosnia don't hear our questions, because you don't speak our language.

To close read is to linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying, and to hold out that these activities can allow us to look both hard and askance at the norm.

This was probably one of those many queer experiences that human beings could not speak of to each other, because though words could be formed into a casket to hold visions, and could be at the same time the power that liberated them, they seemed of little use when one tried to use them to explain to another person what it was they had set free. Words were queer things, Stella decided, to be at once so powerful and so weak.

His face reminded her of an open book that's fallen into a puddle.

Where do they come from, these things that say more than we know and more than we intend?

Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.

Gustav's art isn't political," I said. "You of all people should know that." "All art is political. You of all people should know that.

The woman had been seen now a half-dozen times and had become a mass of characteristic motions and friendly staring eyes. Ellen longed to fix her into a thought, to know what she would say now that she knew how she would look saying it. She longed to find her out, to like her or to hate her.

I'm not saying they're gods or anything of the kind. It's that we don't know how their minds work. We can't judge them by ourselves.

When you entered the cavern of another language, you could leave certain people behind, for they had no interest in following you in. You could, by way of translation, emerge from the cavern and share your adventures with them. You didn't have to be an intellectual in a black beret smoking clove cigarettes to be a translator, not at all. You could become one in your blue flannel pajamas, your face smeared with Clearsil. You did.

What? What are you talking about?