Quotes About Interpretation

After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute. It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply.

I cannot be assured of exactly what I created be it madness and monster or beauty and light.

Categories are how we make sense of the world and communicate our ideas to others. But we are such categorization machines that we often see categories where none exist. That warps our view of the world and our decision-making suffers.

Sometimes, a different way of representing information is the key to understanding something as complicated as the subatomic world.

The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo makes a similar point to Rorty: "We don't reach agreement when we have discovered the truth," he observes; "we say we have discovered the truth when we reach agreement.

Every world needed an artist.

he was resting his eyes, which means he was sleeping but didn't want me to change the channel.

What are the two types of people who can see things that aren't there, Kate? And his quiet whisper of a punch line. Visionaries and psychopaths.

She kept saying it was an "articulate" film. So "articulate." And I guess it was. The thing is, I didn't know what it said even if it said it very well.

E quando eu disse a ela que já os tinha lido, ela me fez umas perguntas muito longas, que na verdade eram apenas as ideias dela com um ponto de interrogação no final.

I just reminded myself that she didn't say it mean. She wasn't making fun of me. She wasn't comparing. Or criticizing.

That's what's great about America: that our freedom of religion allows me to interpret the Bible exactly how it fits my worldview already.

What was it Pound had said in the Cantos? "I am not a demigod—I can't make it cohere.

All people see the world, not as it is, but as they are

It was wrong to do this, said the angel. You should live like a flower, Holding malice like a puppy, Waging war like a lambkin. Not so, quoth the man Who had no fear of spirits; It is only wrong for angels Who can live like the flowers, Holding malice like the puppies, Waging war like the lambkins.

There was a man with tongue of wood Who essayed to sing, And in truth it was lamentable. But there was one who heard The clip-clapper of this tongue of wood And knew what the man Wished to sing, And with that the singer was content.

What a woman says doesn't amount to shucks. It's the way she says it—that's what counts.

Implicit in this is the conviction that the poem or piece of fiction is a made-thing. It is neither received from outside or erupts out of the artist's peculiar sensitivity and superiority.

At some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader, and the writer who ignores this does so at his or her peril.

I have Van Gogh's ear for music

I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift.

Picture this scene. A critic arrives at the gates of heaven. 'And what did you do?' asks Saint Peter. 'Well', says the dead soul. 'I criticised things'. 'I beg your pardon?' 'You know, other people wrote things, performed things, painted things and I said stuff like, thin and unconvincing, turgid and uninspired, competent and serviceable,...you know'.