Quotes About Interpretation

Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events - a story - and when we can't figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.

Six silent people in a room got me to thinking about the voice we hear in our heads when we read, the universal narrator's voice you may well be hearing right now. Whose voice *is* it you're hearing? It's not your own, is it? I didn't think so. It never is. So I posed the question out loud..." ...When you read a book, whose voice is it you hear inside your head? It's certainly not my own, said Harj, and the others chimed in with the same claim. Then whose it?

when future archeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of these gyms and all of this scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we are a culture obsessed with torture.

only twenty percent of human beings have a sense of irony—which means that eighty percent of the world takes everything at face value. I can't imagine anything worse than that. Okay, maybe I can, but imagine reading the morning newspaper and believing it all to be true on some level.

Nobody knows what language is. It isn't just speech, that's for sure. But try to explain that to some of these reductionist structural linguists.

It is all about how human beings construct a narrative out of random events, baseless assumptions, and simple-minded prejudices.

Douglas Preston

many extremely well-organized people have illegible handwriting

when you really parsed what the man had said, he in fact had said nothing.

Do you know, I've always believed there's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written—that's all.

You see, what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our questioning. And what we are, of course, is a response to what we observe.

Finally: there is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our classrooms, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are.

when Legion says, "for we are many," what are the many? Our modern interpretation would be that Legion has a completely fractured psyche. When the psyche fractures, it's like a pane of glass dropped on the ground; it shatters into many bits and pieces. Someone to whom this has happened is literally lost in the unconscious; that becomes their reality.

To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions!

we've come to understand sin as a kind of moral failing, but that interpretation actually comes from the power structures of the church and religious authorities. If you can convince somebody that they are inherently impure and that there is a mistake at the center of their being, then sin becomes a wrongdoing that deserves blame.

Words are such uncertain things, they so often sound well but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.

Two people rarely see the same thing.

The spoken word and the written - there is an astonishing gulf between them. There is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the meaning.

Was bad language used?" asked Colonel Melchett. "It depends on what you call bad language." "Could you understand it?" I asked. "Of course I could understand it." "Then it couldn't have been bad language," I said. Mrs. Price Ridley looked at me suspiciously. "A refined lady," I explained, "is naturally unacquainted with bad language.

Men are so superior about their Latin," said Mrs. Blair. "But all the same I notice that when you ask them to translate inscriptions in old churches, they can never do it! They hem and haw, and get out of it somehow.

It's extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often - both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.

You weren't quite accurate just now." "I? Not accurate?" Poirot sounded affronted.

It was so hard to get an idea of people you had never seen. You had to rely on other people's judgment. ... Other people's impressions were no good to you. They might be just as true as yours but you couldn't act on them. You couldn't, as it were, use another person's angle of attack.