Quotes About Interpretation

I think I see it." I hoped I was looking in the right place. Constellations had always seemed like a cruel joke to me. How could someone take a few dots in the sky, turn them into an elaborate picture, and expect everyone to share their delusion?

The three greatest dolts in the world: Jesus Christ, Don Quixote, and I.

It's never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it's kind of unkillable, poetry. It's our most ancient artform and I think it's more relevant today than ever, because it's one person saying what they really believe.

A signpost doesn't in and of itself represent the way to the village. We have to learn how to take it.

Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.

Acting, Dickens and his contemporaries believed, was the art of gesture, no more and no less.

One thing was for sure: no one wanted a repeat of Christopher Barker's Bible of 1631, which omitted the negative from the seventh commandment so that it read, 'Thou shalt commit adultery.

This is like when we have an argument," Happy said to Melody. "And you go stomping around the room, being mad at me but refusing to say what's wrong because I'm supposed to know. And I never do.

It is already apparent that the 'minimalist' view of the Bible as wholly fictitious and unhooked from historical reality, may be as much of a mistake as the biblical literalism it sought to supersede.

It's certainly hard to find fault with a work that quotes Shakespeare, Homer, and a dirty limerick about "the young man from Oswego.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

My old geography professor once told his class how the music, paintings, sculptures, and books of the world are mirror in which people see versions of themselves.

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object's original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.

You look like a hot tamale." "That's not really a compliment.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

You can decorate absence however you want- but your still gonna feel what's missing.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

My father's theory… was defined by a hasty press as being this—that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity.

In dealing with cunning people, we must ever consider their needs to interpret their speeches.

The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.