Quotes About Interpretation

He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior.

If I don't say the thought right I might destroy it.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

You're looking at me, chair,' he said. 'You don't want me to sit on you, eh, because I fell in mud, isn't that correct?' The chair said nothing.

What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.

They also reminded me of a story Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher included in one of his speeches about the early nineteenth-century French diplomat Talleyrand and his archrival, Prince Metternich of Austria. When Talleyrand died, Metternich was reported to have said, "I wonder what he meant by that?" It seemed that no matter what I said or how plainly I said it, the markets tried to divine some hidden meaning.

was coming to a similar conclusion.

I already was painfully aware that the Fed chairman's remarks can easily be misunderstood or overinterpreted.

but with limited data their answers involved a lot of guesswork.

but there's more to it than has been portrayed.

Assuming that my words would be taken at face value was my first mistake.

The reality that small changes in the phrasing of the FOMC's statement could have important effects on policy expectations sometimes led us to spend what seemed like an inordinate amount of time on the choice of a single word.

The timing alone argues against that hypothesis.

Not that these folks necessarily took what we told them at face value.

writers sneered at it, without actually taking a stand for or against. The

Both had valid points.

Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?

If what any artist has to say is fundamentally human and profound the public will ultimately take his work unto itself. But if his own conceptions are limited and narrow in their human meaning it seems likely that time will erase his work.

the Supreme Court of the United States is supposed to be free of politics. That's why these legalistic doofuses in silly-looking robes get a lifetime appointment and a free supply of arrogance to go with it. They're not supposed to be susceptible to bullying—upholding the Constitution is supposed to be a bully-free job.

Dickens became one of the greatest interpreters of urban life because he was a prodigious walker; his visceral encounters with the physical and human cityscape run through all his work. Urban literature is bound up with walking, because walking takes you away from the familiar, down "long perplexing lanes untrod before," as John Gay put it in his 1716 poem "Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London.

The exegetical foundations would appear to be weak, and one shouldn't build huge theological edifices, no matter how splendid or consistent, on weak foundations.

Every true history is contemporary history.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.