Quotes About Interpretation

That's what poems are for, so you don't understand a thing.

Some would say the Creator is a lamb. Some would say he's a lion. Some would say both. The fact is, he is neither a lamb nor a lion. These are fiction. Metaphors. Yet the Creator is both a lamb and a lion. These are both truths.

Only a woman could make so much out of so little. Give them a single fact and they'd fashion it into a story before taking a single breath.

It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention.

The luminous spirit (maybe he is a crowd of spirits), that takes account of everything and gives everything its meaning, is missing, not missing, just incommunicado. But here and there, it may be, we hear it. It is human of course, but it is also everything that lives.

Anything might have been anything else and had as much meaning to it.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

malapropism

She wondered what it said about her spiritual fitness that her clearest messages from the Almighty seemed to come from the alternative rock station.

A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who's forgotten words so I can have a word with him?8

You know what a word means when you know how to use it, not what its definition is. That is why we can understand and use all sorts of words that we struggle to define clearly if we are put on the spot and asked to do so.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

The power of art is the power of truth.

Probably our lives are full of symbols which only an unacknowledged sense perceives. Spiritual events assume a material guise, in accordance with some creative principle, but do not insist on recognition. ("Absolute Evil")

We all know how the size of sums of money appears to vary in a remarkable way according as they are being paid in or paid out.

And as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words or even of the syntax or the sentences and punctuation, but only of their meaning. As you listen to an address, phonemes disappear into words and words into sentences and sentences disappear into what they are trying to say, into meaning. To be conscious of the elements of speech is to destroy the intention of the speech.

language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication

Most people would fiercely resist the idea that they need any instruction in how to listen to music. Because we can hear, we think we can listen. But just because we can see, we don't assume we can read. Reading

art's specific and distinctive claim rests on something beyond its immediate potency and that a richer understanding of it involves a sensitivity to its formal properties that goes beyond its immediate emotional effect. A