Quotes About Interpretation

What are you doing?" Grace had asked him. "Gangsta poses. Yo, whatchya think?" "That I should get you seizure medication.

But the truth is, we all take facts and compute them through our own experiences.

Logan's overall score was a six-point-seven. Jimmy only has a score of six-point-four. Even with today's new math, six-point-seven is greater than six-point-four. I can show you with a graph if that would help.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as right or wrong. But I'm saying what may work for some doesn't work for others.

Man denkt sich nicht mit der psychischen Brechstange in jemanden hinein.

Shakespeare will not make us better and will not make us worse, but he may allow us to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves.

The work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists ourselves...The art of reading poetry is an authentic training in the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.

I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God than are Dante's Commedia, Shakespeare's King Lear, or Tolstoy's novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity

We are lived by drives we cannot command, and we are read by works we cannot resist.

Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

Walter Pater defined Romanticism as adding strangeness to beauty.

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.

Dante subsumed everything, and so, in a sense, secularized nothing.

Ao contrário do que dizem certos parisienses, o texto está aí não para dar prazer, mas o elevado desprazer ou prazer mais difícil que um texto menor não dará.

Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, tuned the English tongue.

The freedom to apprehend aesthetic value may rise from class conflict, but the value is not identical with the freedom, even if it cannot be achieved without that apprehension. Aesthetic value is by definition engendered by an interaction between artists, an influencing that is always an interpretation.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics [.]

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

I again recall provoking resentment by dubbing the American bard "a male lesbian," much as Shakespeare was when writing the sonnets.

that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics

I have received many nasty letters from neo-conservatives, who denounce me because I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions.

Saint-Beuve, para mí el más interesante de los críticos franceses, nos enseñó a hacernos una pregunta crucial acerca de cualquier escritor al que leemos a fondo: ¿Qué piensa el autor de nosotros?

What matters most (and it is the central point of this book) is that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation that I call poetic misprision.