Quotes About Interpretation

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.

When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.

religion ceases to be religion when its poetic authority is recast as civic authority.

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because ti now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves. The earlier artists worked within the outlines they imagined; the later reworked their imaginations.

This does not mean that infinite players are politically disengaged; it means rather that they are political without having a politics, a paradoxical position easily misinterpreted. To have a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to reach a desired end; to be political—in the sense meant here—is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends, that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.

Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because it now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves.

people like stories because they are good, not because they are true.

I drew a picture of Bigs Maloney. It came out looking like Frankenstein on a bad hair day. In other words, it looked just like Bigs.

All you need do, Bernie,"she gulped her toast soaked in coffee, "is present the truth as fiction.

The model of semantic interpretation we construct should reflect the particular properties and difficulties of natural language, and not simply be an application of a ready-to-wear logical formalism to a new body of data

The raw data of anthropologists can be misleading; it can make the differences in values between cultures appear greater than they are...It is only that life forces upon them choices that we do not have to make.

We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

you say carjacking, i say borrowing.

It ain't always rocket science, sometimes a door is just a door.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;

If letters had eyebrows, these would be arched.

As sung by Schipa, 'Che farò senza Euridice' is indeed the grief-stricken piece that Gluck intended. The true measure of its success lies in the word-note-tone relationship, where the art and idiom of the singer is added to the art of the composer in order to ensure the effective portrayal of human emotion.

It always matters who the storyteller is. It's a lens.