Quotes About Interpretation

There are some people who see a great deal and some who see very little in the same things.

A literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art.

Nada tiene significado excepto el que nosotros le damos.

nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it.

nada tiene significado excepto el que nosotros le damos».

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

We had the experience but missed the meaning, an approach to the meaning restores the experience

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.

Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.

We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

that's not what I meant at all... that's not it at all.

If Hell is where nothing connects, then being in the field of English must be the key to heaven's door! We are in the business of finding connections--within texts, between texts and contexts, between texts and ourselves, between our readings and the readings of other interpreters.

We must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are capable of having done to them.

Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

I could see nothing behind that child's eye. 40 I have seen eyes in the street Trying to peer through lighted shutters, And a crab one afternoon in a pool, An old crab with barnacles on his back, Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning

Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.

Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader….

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment.