Quotes About Interpretation

The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business, in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.

I don't understand you.

Fanny Assingham had at this moment the sense as of a large heaped dish presented to her intelligence and inviting it to a feast-- so thick were the notes of intention in this remarkable speech.

She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was the last word, would end with a sort of meaning.

Avete ragione che Millie non è facile a conoscere. Uno la vede, con intensità: la vede più di quanto non veda nessun altro; ma poi scopre che ciò non significa conoscerla, e che si può conoscere meglio una persona che non si riesca, diciamo, a vedere neppure appena la metà.

The" thing was the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was—the implication here was complete. Not

It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.

Charlotte was in pain, Charlotte was in torment, but he himself had given her reason enough for that; and, in respect to the rest of the whole matter of her obligation to follow her husband, that personage and she, Maggie, had so shuffled away every link between consequence and cause that the intention remained, like some famous poetic line in a dead language subject to varieties of interpretation. What

It isn't a question of any beauty,' said Maggie; 'it's only a question of the quantity of truth.' 'Oh the quantity of truth!' the Prince richly though ambiguously murmured.

Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held that nothing ever was in fact—for any one else—explained.

She took it as if the words were all she had wished; as if they brought her, gave her something that was the compensation of her case.

In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except by style, but in which everything is saved by it.

We must allow the artist his subject. It is only what he makes of it that we can judge.

Then it hasn't been love, said May Bartram. Well, I at least thought it was. I took it for that--I've taken it till now. It was agreeable, it was delightful, it was miserable, he explained.

Everything hinges on how you look at things

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.

She wanted them to argue with her, to gush, to rhapsodize. She wanted them to sparkle, not to chew. Words...words...words... She gobbled them up, spewed them out again, added them up, juggled them, nursed them along, carried them to bed and put them under the pillow like soiled pajamas, slept on them, snored over them. Words... When every other memory of her had fled there would remain-HER WORDS.

Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.

I would say that the "masterpiece" was the creative act itself and not a particular work which happened to please a large audience and be accepted as the very body of Christ.

Klasikleri sindirmiÅŸ olan herkes, düÅŸmand?r insanl??a

When a portrait commences badly it's because you're not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.

The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. (revised, correct quote)