Quotes About Interpretation

I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible.

I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world.

I was bad at relationships. I was bad at reading between lines, at figuring out what people really meant if they didn't actually say it, and at being charming or flirty or whatever it was, exactly, that women were supposed to do to attract men.

From all I did and all I said let no one try to find out who I was. An obstacle was there that changed the pattern of my actions and the manner of my life. An obstacle was often there to stop me when I'd begin to speak. From my most unnoticed actions, my most veiled writing— from these alone will I be understood.

I never did very well in math-I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife

And it is always the victors who write the historical narrative.

My advice to the reader approaching a poem is to make the mind still and blank. Let the poem speak. This charged quiet mimics the blank space ringing the printed poem, the nothing out of which something takes shape.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

Male urination is a form of commentary.

Literature and art are never created for scholars but for a universal audience. If academics cannot see that audience, the cannot see art.

But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together-and, quite frankly, they often don't get along.

The poplars were a symbol. It was only the light from behind the poplars that made their silhouettes visible.

The bird still didn't move. Mrs. Yun thought it had discerned her deepest, innermost ideas. Actually, she herself didn't know exactly what those ideas were.

Ja siinä se on: kansainvälisesti tunnettu ilme, joka viestii: Olen raivoissani ja sinun kyllä pitäisi tietää miksi, mutta minä en sitä aio kertoa.

The shortest distance between two minds is a figure of speech.

You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.

All colours are arbitrary.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

Religious sects, established and marginal, and some newly invented for the purpose, were dissecting the theological implications of the Message. Some thought it was from God, and some from the Devil. Astonishingly, some were even unsure.

Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.

If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it's not surprising that occasionally we'll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn't find one here and there.

the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples.

we completely decrypt it, how good could the translation be? You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry.