Quotes About Interpretation

a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it than it can do of the man who's got it on his back.

Le propre d'une métaphore, c'est d'être réelle

Bad art is from no one to no one.

I wonder what they think of me in their world of light, deaf to the broken patterns around them. I wonder what stories they have invented, to explain me when I cannot explain myself.

The Spire is a bad card. It can mean a literal tower, but it also means a fall from a height, whether literal or figurative, the destruction of something old and valuable. It means isolation, abandonment. It is the card of the scapegoat." "All of them things?" He raises an eyebrow at me. "The card also means falling to prey to your own self-confidence.

Our minds have to translate magic into symbols we understand.

He gave me a look, indecipherable as all Mildmay's looks were.

He wasn't talking to me; he sounded like somebody reciting a poem, and his eyes were wide and dreaming and stark barking mad.

Our responses to events are far more significant than the events themselves

In Wangechi Mutu's mother tongue, Kikuyu, there is no word for "artist." The closest term is something like "magician" or "a person who uses objects and imbues them with meaning and power,

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

It was then she said I had grown cynical. I said, that I had always been cynical—she had only never called it that. She had said rather that I was brave. She had called me an original. She had seemed to admire me for it.

Now I feel myself a book, as books must seem to her: she looks at me with unreading eyes, sees the shape, but not the meaning of the text. She marks the white flesh ?'Ain't you pale!' she says ? but not the quick, corrupted blood beneath.

Words, hmm? They seduce us in darkness, and the mind clothes and fashions them to fashions of its own.

There was a lot under those words. I'd go digging for it later.

But art is supposed to enlighten, isn't it? Not just reflect? It's to show us the best of the present modeled in the best of the past.

What is art but a way of seeing?

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text.

Mark Twain once put it, "The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference

Since representatives of formal agencies judge leadership according to their own criteria, evaluate what is good or bad in the community according to their own standards, and understand life in the community only when interpreted according to their own code or standards-it is crystal clear that they don't know the meaning of indigenous leadership, let alone the identities of these natural leaders...

Patrick opens his arms about three feet wide and, with one finger pointing up on each hand, tries to show the scope of this thing. I notice that he doesn't look at his hands as he does this, but at the wall behind me. It suddenly occurs to me that when people describe size this way, they're relying on perspective to help them. He's not saying 'It's this big.' He's saying 'It would look this big from here if it was over there.

Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …' I'm drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But

If it is art, it is not for all. If it is for all, it is not art.

She stared at me with that questioning look people often get when I open my mouth.