Quotes About Interpretation

I like the way she dances. She shows a heavy Pharaonic influence, I'd say, in the elbows. With perhaps just a soupçon of Snoopy in the feet.

The strip lay poised on the needle-sharp fulcrum between the marvelous and the vulgar that was, to Rosa, the balancing point of Surrealism itself.

They feed on the meat of this remark, gauging its flavor and vitamin content.

At any rate, as Uncle Ray once explained to him, if you examined the language, the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.

Dinner was a fur muff, a dozen clothespins, and some old dish towels boiled up with carrots. The fact that the meal was served with a bottle of prepared horseradish enabled Sammy to conclude that it was intended to pass for braised short ribs of beef - flanken. Many of Ethel's specialties arrived thus encoded by condiments.

there had been times in the past when my sister-in-law's counsel, while never useful, had provided a certain amount of welcome bemusement, like the advice of an oracular hen.

After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something.

Fulgoni gave me a look that I interpreted as a warning that I was crossing into a territory that he had deemed off-limits when we had last discussed his testimony. I gave him a look back that said too fucking bad. I have you under oath. I own you.

Getting the quote right isn't what matters. It's remembering what it means.

It is in the instinctual interpretation of voice and personality that we form our judgments of others. Nothing beats that. Not fingerprints, not DNA, not the pointed finger of an eyewitness.

From stockbrokers to soccer moms, there are twelve minds on the jury and they've all been marinated in different life experiences. You have to tell them all the same story. And you only get one chance. That's the trick. Twelve minds, one story. It's got to be a story that speaks to each of them.

I must be able to tell more than what happened. I must tell why. It's breadth and depth again—the ol' B and D—and I am used to that.

Shelly Berg Trio's take on "Blackbird

The internal psychological pressure to make up a story, to explain the ruins before one's eyes, is powerful indeed.

It's hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we're seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed but what CAN BE observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way.

Gee," Tim said, "I didn't know you had such personal feelings about it." "It should be accurate," Malcolm said. "You know, there is such a thing as accurate and inaccurate. Irrespective of whatever your feelings are.

Too often, the people who write captions to photographs indulge their own uninformed fantasies about the pictures and what they mean.

Nothing is obvious.

The Indians think these fossils are the bones of serpents, which is to say reptiles. We think they were reptiles, too. They think these creatures were gigantic. So do we. They think these gigantic reptiles lived in the distant past. So do we. They think the Great Spirit killed them. We say we don't know why they disappeared—but since we offer no explanation of our own, how can we be sure theirs is superstition?

Monster' is a relative term; to a canary, a cat is a monster. We're just used to being the cat.

One of the first things you learned in law school was that the law was not about truth. It was about dispute resolution. In the course of resolving a dispute, the truth might or might not emerge.

If true computer music were ever written, it would only be listened to by other computers.

The art we produce lives in queasy balance with the art we can imagine the art the room expects.

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.