Quotes About Interpretation

Do you really think he was flirting with me?" "Let's see. He gave you candy you hate - I saw your face - and a CD of songs..." He looks at the CD. "All of these are, like, twenty years old at least. Figures. Oh, and he groped your face. Sounds like true love to me.

I think what Vincent wanted was for me to find him in his words, even between the lines. Then he wanted me to write him a story he could live in just as I had once told him I might.

I wrote the story, but you will bring to it your own experience of life, and some other reader will do the same, and it will become a different story with each reader. I believe that even the time in your life when you read the book will determine how you receive it. Our lives are changing constantly, and therefore not even our own story is always what we think it is.

You're an easy woman to please," he had said to her. And she had said, "You may be the first person to think that.

My mother told me in the hospital that day that I was not like my brother and sister: "Look at your life right now. You just went ahead and...did it." Perhaps she meant that I was already ruthless. Perhaps she meant that, but I don't know what my mother meant.

It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author," and that alone made me glad I had come.

she'd have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

It's not my job to make readers know what's a narrative voice and not the private view of the author

But we are all mythologies

I said on the phone to my mother, "I think I'm going to write the story of the Burgess kids." "It's a good one," she agreed. "People will say it's not nice to write about people I know." My mother was tired that night. She yawned. "Well, you don't know them," she said. "Nobody ever knows anyone.

Because two people can't have entirely different opinions without one of them being final.

You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

We look at a picture throughout our lives, we listen to a piece of music throughout our lives, we read a book time and again throughout our lives, as we should do—especially the scriptures—and it is different each time. Something else comes in. We see something else there that we never saw before, because we are a different person each time we experience a work of art.

A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian's inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

History, people like to say, is written by the winners. The truth is, some of the most profound works on the past were written by those who considered themselves history's losers.

Beyond the actual words of God, and underneath the literal narrative of law, history, and even geography, Origen could discern timeless truths waiting to be pointed out and explained. This way of reading the Bible, called exegesis, would become standard during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Middle Ages came to interpret just about everything morally, symbolically, or allegorically and sometimes all three.

True criticism is the reflection of the thing criticized upon the spirit of the critic

Lippen die je kussen, hoef je niet te lezen.

Misschien acteer ik, zegt ze, omdat wij al zoveel mogelijkheden in de steen hebben moeten achterlaten. Maar dat is nu juist het verschil tussen het beeld en de beeldhouwer, roep ik haar na, de een moet wachten tot iemand iets in hem ziet, de ander is vrij zichzelf vorm te geven.

It is all nonsense, to be sure and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning.

He could even talk about painting, and that's more than can be said of most painters.

If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician; we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster