Quotes About Interpretation

If 4 out of 5 people SUFFER from diarrhea…does that mean that 1 enjoys it?

Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] Look, they nearly missed! Yes, but not quite.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?

A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.

I get tired of people talking about ''bad words'' and ''bad language''. Bullshit! It's the context that makes them good or bad.

The only difference between lilies and turds is whatever difference humans have agreed upon; and I don't always agree.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

It's ill guessing what the bats are flying after.

Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable

He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confident or distrustful.

Perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with love: he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and the beauty it bears for him.

When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamund's fingers, and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.

I want that sort of thing — not ideas, you know, but a way of putting them.

The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

Sir James paused. He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons: it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being told, since he only felt what was reasonable. At