Quotes About Interpretation

Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine's future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials. 'Oh, yes, we certainly don't

We don't see the world as a botanist who is at the same time an architect, a physician, a geologist, and a ship's captain. Recognizing isn't at all like seeing; the two often don't even agree...

Most poetry just confounds me. I really want to like it, but I can't help thinking it's a hoax. (p. 24)

The phrase 'I just turn on my monkey and it makes me feel good' sounds very dirty, but I can't explain why. It's great to try to use expressions like that on the comics page. People want to complain but they can't, because they can't figure out quite what they should be complaining about.

Nulle part autant qu'ici on ne constate aussi nettement l'étonnante différence qui peut exister entre les récits faits à la même heure d'un seul et même événe- ment par plusieurs observateurs.

You are a different 'other' for each person you come into contact with, depending on how they 'read' or experience you. And, of course, each person you meet is an other for you in a way which comes very much out of your subjective reading of who that person is, your unconscious assumptions, as well as what could be called facts about the person.

To the flow of recognition between my 'I' and your 'you' I bring my desires, my prejudices, and the force of my needs—conscious and unconscious—to the 'evidence' before me. In doing this, I create my own version of you. What this adds up to is that you are a somewhat different other for each person with whom you have contact.

At first when you're learning a foreign language, what seems strange is that a different set of words exists for the things you know. But then, after a while, what seems strange is that so many words are the same, that two entirely different peoples, an ocean apart, would choose the exact same sounds. In the end, what causes the most trouble are the words that sound the same but mean different things: déception, nostalgie, grâce.

What you hear depends on how you listen.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

The originator of a new concept...finds, as a rule, that it is much more difficult to find out why other people do not understand him, than it was to discover the new truth.

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

Any truth is only true up to a certain point. When one oversteps the mark, it becomes a non-truth.

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

Our world has changed for better or for worse. It is for us to find truth and beauty for today, constantly re-applying the truth of God's word to our own time and our contemporary situation.

All faith is false, all faith is true. Truth is the shattered mirror strown in myriad bits, while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.

Truth is in history, but history is not the truth.

I create situations that do not exist. I seek the truth from fiction.

Human eyes are the sign language of the brain. If you watch them carefully, you can see the truth played out, raw and unguarded.

Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

There are many levels of truth.