Quotes About Interpretation

The Substitute Word concept can be applied to any seemingly abstract material. Basically, it's this: When you hear or see a word or phrase that seems abstract or intangible to you, think of something—anything—that sounds like, or reminds you of, the abstract material and can be pictured in your mind.

It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

You don't get it, do you? I said. "It's not a question of 'what then'. Some people get a kick out of reading railroad timetables and that's all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?

I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, "It's true. There aren't any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words." I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.

Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted?

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.

Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.

A fire can be any shape it wants to be. It's free. So it can look like anything at all, depending on what's inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that's because it's showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself...

Force yourself to explain it and you create lies.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

But the silence spoke volumes.

Is that what you see in my eyes, that you know nothing about me?" "Nothing is written in your eyes. I replied. It is written in my eyes and i see the reflection in yours

En la vida siempre hay cosas demasiado complicadas para explicarlas en cualquier idioma.

That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.

In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

I'm not very good at giving people orderly explanations of things.

I'm not very good at putting my feelings into words. That's why people misunderstand me.

And it was the kind of thing that loses the most important nuances when reduced to words. He had never told anyone about it, and he probably never would.