Quotes About Interpretation

What is man to decide what poetry is?

For him the death is now only on this side, For him, danger and safety have another meaning.

I would explain, but you would none of you believe it; If you believed it, still you would not understand.

About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong.

I cannot feel that my appreciation of Milton leads anywhere outside of the mazes of sound.

My own Toryism is only intelligible on the understanding that there are no Tories in politics at all.

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

I suspect, in fact, that a good deal of the value of an interpretation is -- that it should be my own interpretation.

Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images

Would it have been worthwhile If one settling a pillow by her head should say: That is not what I meant at all That is not it at all

People who do not understand irony cannot understand fiction.

Theo knew enough about women and their clothes to recognize she was trying to strike an appropriate balance between... what? Between liking him and hating him? Between wanting to look good and not wanting to look too available? Just because he knew a mixed message when he saw one didn't mean he knew exactly which messages were being mixed

So that's what--one yes, one not sure, and one I had had a dream about a bug.

You see, that is the secret of history, little Briony—who tells the last story.

In India an explanation is often more confusing than what prompted it.

Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur'an is the Qur'an. The true Qur'an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur'an is in written form.

Where everyone else sees a straight line, you see a maze, and when I'm done talking to you, the maze starts to make more sense --Reply by Dove to Aly's silent inquiry

You don't think history gets rewritten, sometimes?

His eyes on her across the distance had seen only symbols, not a face or frame.

I see you are beginning to read me like a scroll.

the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin depends entirely on the dance.

Because you told me once that the difference between a columnist and a reporter is that the columnist has the luxury to not only ask why but to try and answer it.

I like the modern form. Anyone who absolutely has to understand everything he sees misses a lot. It's not always true that obscure words come from obscure thoughts.

Four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking-glass. Questions shooting out and then hiding again. I don't know: Gleams and radiance, gleaming from you to me, from me to you, and from me to you alone—into the mirror and out again, and never an answer about what this is, never an explanation.