Quotes About Interpretation

Was your husband upset?' 'How can you tell with an Englishman?

I hate it when people listen to what I say in an inappropriate fashion.

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read.

A single message, no matter how apparently unambiguous, can mean more than one thing. I'm counting on it.

Artists don't create society, they reflect it

an intention that radiates out of you. It's humility and gratitude. It's about living inside the notes, and between them, and understanding that each of those notes may mean a completely different thing to each person in an audience. Once it leaves your fingertips or your lips, it's no longer yours. Maybe it never was.

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

El lector es un crítico con una ocupación importantísima: complacerse a sí mismo.

Reader, look,Not at his picture, but his book.

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.

The fatal problem with poetry: poems.

The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media," I said, meaninglessly.

Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.

Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn't face each other, could intuit each other's presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.

Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn't get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality.

I became fascinated with this phenomenon of hearing loud voices at a distance and trying to account how I knew they were loud when I can barely hear them. Something about their shapes or their shapelessness or the way they filter through the walls.

I wish all difficult poems were profound. Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound.

If he had the language, he wouldn't express himself with symptoms.

CAPTAIN RAMIREZ: "Ootunondumi rabo Caaguazu." FRANCISCO: "Bokinmaginum sinking." RAMIREZ: "Help.

Everyone rehearses their recollections, believing that the more often an event is remembered, the closer we come to its reality. This is not always true. Most people tell a version of the past, and then either stick to or embellish it.

Ernest Hemingway based Robert Jordan, the main character in For Whom the Bell Tolls, partly on Umar Mamsurov.

When told to do something, he tended to "obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about.

It is perfectly possible for two people to listen to the same words and hear entirely different things.

The sign red "Sky and Celery." Closer, it read "Ski and Cyclery.