Quotes About Interpretation

So this, as far as I can tell, is what the birds told me. A message from afar. Obscure Writing. Innocence eroded.

One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.

Once you start parsing a face, it's a peculiar item: squishy, pointy, with lots of air vents and wet spots.

mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two

Keating can be somewhat liberal with the profanity, so I shall substitute the word 'albatross' where necessary, and you may read that part privately later.

The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as "theory of mind.

The study of a language . . . allows its students to hear a people's 'interpretation (or misinterpretation) of messages from environment to human.' The spoken word reveals, upon reflection, that to which its speakers first chose to listen, then ponder, then live by.

Gr-EEN! YEL-low! OR-ange!" Griffin cries in quick succession. He's just naming random colors—all except the right one. Except, of course, his words aren't really chosen at random. "You notice he always says the name of a color," Arlene points out. "He understands the category.

Take that rose bush, for example. We are all looking at the same plant, but our perception of it varies according to the way we each think and see. One person may see a vigorous rose, another may see a rose that could benefit from a little pruning, and a third may see a mess that no amount of attention would save. The rose bush isn't changing; it's the way we personally perceive it that differs, the way each of us thinks that colors our perception.

I plan to learn enough to read you like a book.

I'd like to pay your palms the same favor that you pay these pages, searching them for grooves and images and the secret signs of hunger, as you may scan these words for hidden messages. The lines of your hand might be a guide to your gifts for pleasure, or a clue to where you'll take me, or a map of where I might take you.

Para el monolingüe no hay sino una lengua desde donde se piensa un solo mundo, y lo distinto siempre se da -si es que se da- peligrosamente: en traducción.

The first time I saw a fingerbowl was at the home of my benefactress. [...] The water had a few cherry blossoms in it, and I thought it must be some clear sort of Japanese after-dinner soup and ate every bit of it, including the crisp little blossoms.

She looked terrible, but very wise.

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plush auditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl with no makeup who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream stopper, a dream explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves

And thou, there has always furthermore in addition inescapably and forever got to be a Thou. Otherwise there is no i because i am what other people interpret me as being and am nothing if there were no people.

Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar, but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

Buddy said he figured there must be something in poetry if a girl like me spent all her days over it, so each time we met I read him some poetry and explained to him what I found in it.

And another: perhaps a version of the waitress story: only I haven't got it here. Make it up. Naturalistic. Jewel prose. Make out little paragraphs of what happens to whom. Then think it clear. Write it.

You have left a momentary part of you which I will work into something.

I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of James Joyce.

my inspiration is paintings and not music when I go to some other art form . . . I see these things very clearly.