Quotes About Interpretation

Just a few months before his fateful train trip, Theo had sent a grateful note to the first critic who dared to praise his brother's work: "You have read these pictures, and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

If the cartoon were completely accurate, though, life would be a cacophany of spoinks.

There is a joke about a little girl who is filling in a hole in her garden when a neighbor looks over the fence. He politely asks, Hi! What are you up to? My goldfish died, replies the girl tearfully, and I've just buried him. The neighbor asks, Isn't that an awfully big hole for a goldfish? The little girl tamps down the soil and replies, That's because he's inside your stupid cat.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.

Gratuitous redundancy makes prose difficult not just because readers have to duplicate the effort of figuring something out, but because they naturally assume that when a writer says two things she means two things, and fruitlessly search for the nonexistent second point.

The problem with thoughtless signposting is that the reader has to put more work into understanding the signposts than she saves in seeing what they point to

The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery.

The meaning of a word, then, seems to consist of information stored in the heads of the people who know the word: the elementary concepts that define it and, for a concrete word, an image of what it refers to.

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

We are verbivores, a species that lives on words, and the meaning and use of language are bound to be among the major things we ponder, share, and dispute.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking.

When we know something well, we don't realize how abstractly we think about it. And we forget that other people, who have lived their own lives, have not gone through our idiosyncratic histories of abstractification.

The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The

a reader must know the topic of a text in order to understand it.

If there's a bag in your car, and a gallon of milk in the bag, there is a gallon of milk in your car. But if there's a person in your car, and a gallon of blood in a person, it would be strange to conclude that there is a gallon of blood in your car.

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

Humans construct an understanding of the world that is very different from the analogue flow of sensation the world presents to them. They package their experience into objects and events. They assemble these objects and events into propositions, which they take to be characterisations of real and possible worlds. The characterisations are highly schematic: they pick out some aspects of a situation and ignore others, allowing the same situation to be construed in multiple ways.

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self:

Although 'to paint' means something like to cause to be covered with paint, one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that Michelangelo painted the ceiling when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint.

The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.

The information contained in a pattern depends on how coarsely or finely grained our view of the world is.