Quotes About Interpretation

I have never been an eavesdropper, even in childhood. Not from any sense of virtue but because I really do not want to know what people think of me or, to be precise, what they say of me - often a different matter. I can usually imagine the unpleasant judgements, for we are what others needs us to be. That is why our reputations change so often and so drastically, reflecting no particular change in us, merely a change in the mood of those who observe us.

To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round

When Franklin says yes, yes, yes, he isn't agreeing with you. He's just listening to you.

True history, said Hearst, with a smile that was, for once, almost charming, is the final fiction. I thought even you knew that.

Movies were not there simply to reflect life or tell stories but to exist in their own autonomous way and to look, as it were, back at those who made them and watched them.

It's the individual's specific way of perceiving the world that swings the whole game in a different direction.

And in Islam, the Sunni branch in particular is characterized by a lack of centralized theological control or even of a single authoritative voice like a pope. So, in one sense, it shares the same dilemma as Protestantism. There is no one figure in Sunni Islam who can speak with absolute or binding authority on questions of interpretation of Islam. The

Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different

What did the truth matter? All characters once dead, if they continue to exist in memory at all, tend to become fictions.

There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.

She loved him whatever that meant but love was not an eternal

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atento a los latidos de su corazón «como si intentaran transmitirle un mensaje, un aviso, en un código que no podía entender».

O ódio parece mexer com as mesmas glândulas que o amor: produz até as mesmas ações. Se não nos tivessem ensinado a interpretar a história da Paixão, será que seríamos capazes de dizer, julgando apenas pelas ações, se foi o ciumento Judas ou o covarde Pedro quem amou a Cristo?

Decía ver las escenas que contaba como a través del ojo móvil de una cámara. Y la cámara seguía a los personajes, captaba rasgos y detalles significativos, iluminados o en penumbra, en primer plano o como figuras al fondo de la escena, entre la luz, el claroscuro y lo negro.

Do you know that St Matthew mentions Hell fifteen times in fifty-two pages of my bible and St John not once?

I wrote what I saw. I took no action—even an opinion is a kind of action.

We wouldn't expect to gather crucial information about modern cultures from their knives, forks, hammers, and screwdrivers, so why should we suddenly set different standards when we try to understand the ancient world?

Egyptologic"—i.e. that special form of reasoning, with a built-in double standard, deployed only by Egyptologists.

Of course, everything depends on who is telling the story. It always does.

And what if orphans really were called orchids? And if the sky was called the ground. And if a tree was called a daffodil. Would it make any difference to the actual nature of things? Or their mystery?

Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.

These characters were like twelve-bar blues or other chord progressions. Given the basic parameters of Batman, different creators could play very different music.