Quotes About Interpretation

These descriptions do really state the truth- as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts-by help of the readers imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.

It is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else.

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.

But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.

persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it.

I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners. Manners! he said. Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction.

Man muß die Tatsachen kennen, bevor man sie verdrehen kann.

When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you—every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

So I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a pictured face is intended to express. There is not one man in five hundred that can go into a court-room and be sure that he will not mistake some harmless innocent of a juryman for the black-hearted assassin on trial. Yet such people talk of character and presume to interpret expression in pictures.

Does Jane Austen do her work too remorselessly well? For me, I mean? Maybe that is it. She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

But how should I know whether they were boys or girls?" "Goodness sakes, mars Clay, don't de Good Book say? 'Sides, don't it call 'em de HE-brew chil'en? If dey was gals wouldn't dey be de SHE-brew chil'en? Some people dat kin read don't 'pear to take no notice when dey do read.

Shakespeare hiçbir ÅŸey yaratmad?. O, doÄŸru bir ÅŸekilde gözlemledi ve fevkalade resmetti.

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. (the other Mark).

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there. HUNTING

Considering the elaborate circumstantiality of detail observable in the item, it seems to me that it ought to contain more information than it does. On

We are waenkkd , hj

Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.

We know little about history beyond its public displays, and even then what we know is reconstructed.

Often we see the situation (A) and the reaction (C) but are unaware of the interpretation (B).

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.