Quotes About Interpretation

like a castle and from the other, it seemed to be a villa. The

You do realize that bunny butt is just a polite way of saying rabbit ass.

Ah, but what is history? Is it a record of what happened or rather our interpretation of what happened?" "I think it's both," I answer. "It has to be both. What good is remembering an event if you don't remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing and neither would anyone else.

Dissecting a book was the same as making sense of life. You have to find a way to interpret life, or you'll go nuts.

O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

Art is seduction, not rape.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams

None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew what it did. From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.

In fact, words do speak louder than pictures. Captions do tend to override the evidence of our eyes; but no caption can permanently restrict or secure a picture's meaning.

La sabiduría esencial de la imagen fotográfica afirma: «Ésa es la superficie. Ahora piensen —o más bien sientan, intuyan— qué hay más allá, cómo debe de ser la realidad si ésta es su apariencia».

Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one-and can help build a nascent one.

With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.