Quotes About Interpretation

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead. The shaping power of language cannot be avoided. We cannot choose to distance ourselves from it. We can n choose to employ it in one way rather than another. (42)

What is a sentence, anyway?

Truth is too multi-faceted to be contained in a five-line summary.

If you really want to communicate something, even if it's just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you're getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.

The book can also be a hat.

In every house of marriagethere's room for an interpreter.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior. That is why ideology, an attempt to interpret the condition of man, is always a prominent feature of revolutions, wars, and other circumstances in which individuals are called upon to perform extraordinary action.

Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behavior.

On the whole, art should not be explained; it must be experienced.

Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.

And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him.

his jest implies: "Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set even a menu to music.

I am not one to compare long melodies as did Mozart. I can't get beyond short themes. But what I can do, is to utilize such a theme, paraphrase it and extract everything that is in it, and I don't think there's anybody today who can match me at that.

when my own works disappeared from the German language I could more clearly grasp his lament at being able to produce the created word only in translation, in a diluted, altered medium.

Neyin gerçek, neyin yanl?? olduÄŸunu öyle uzaktan, insanlar?n sana anlatt?klar?na bakarak nas?l bilebilirsin ki?

He spoke fluently as if he were reading from an invisible page, and yet each individual sentence was so plastically and clearly formed that, had it been taken down in shorthand, his conversation would have been a perfect exposition, ready for the press.

Toda nuestra fantasía y toda nuestra lógica no pueden facilitarnos sino una idea insuficiente del origen de una obra de arte.

He saw "the nationalism as of horned cattle", of brute beasts whose highest conception was selfishness based upon a narrow interpretation of history

After another minute Reuben brought forth the following sentence: 'I ha' scranleted two hundred furrows come five o'clock down i' the bute.' It was a difficult remark, Flora felt, to which to reply. Was

For it is a peculiarity of persons who lead rich, emotional lives, and who (as the saying is) live intensely and with a wild poetry, that they read all kinds of meanings into comparatively simple actions, especially the actions of other people, who do not live intensely and with a wild poetry.

The farmhouse itself no longer looked like a beast about to spring. (Not that it ever had, to her, for she was not in the habit of thinking that things looked exactly like other things which were as different from them in appearance as it was possible to be.)

She is a character in a novel who reads the other characters as characters and rewrites them as people.