Quotes About Interpretation

Watering down the currency of expression, causing anything to mean whatever you want it to mean, until nothing is meant and nothing is precise.

I think it is just a matter of getting into the mind of the writer," Vetinari went on, looking at a letter covered with grubby fingerprints and what looked like the remains of someone's breakfast. He added: "In some cases, I imagine, there is a lot of room.

We spray our fantasies on the landscape like a dog sprays urine. It turns it into ours. Once we've invented our gods and demons, we can propitiate or exorcize them. Once we've put fairies in the sinister solitary thorn tree, we can decide where we stand in relation to it; we can hang ribbons on it, see visions under it—or bulldoze it up and call ourselves free of superstition.

If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"…was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called him handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"…well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories didn't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told

She collected silence like other people collected strings. But she had a way of saying nothing that said it all.

That was great, al' that reading' ye did!' said Rob Anybody. 'I didnae understand a single word o' it!' 'Aye, it must be powerful language if you cannae make oout what the heel it's goin' on aboot!' said another pictsie.

You see, it's not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means.

Everyone found their eyes turning toward Adam. He seemed to be thinking very carefully. Then he said: "I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.

Perhaps there is something in this reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits? It was a cumbersome phrase. Rincewind tried to get his tongue around the thick syllables that were the word in Twoflower's own language. Ecolirix? he tried. Ecro-gnothics? Echo-gnomics? That would do. That sounded about right.

Witches knew that mysterious omens were around all the time. The world was always very nearly drowning in mysterious omens. You just had to pick the one that was convenient.

Leonardo had felt so too. "I got her bloody smile right in the roughs," he told Crowley, sipping cold wine in the lunchtime sun, "but it went all over the place when I painted it. Her husband had a few things to say about it when I delivered it, but, like I tell him, Signor del Giocondo, apart from you, who's going to see it?

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that makes us human.

Listen very carefully... listen to everyone and don't say much and think about what they say and how they say it and watch their eyes... it becomes like a big jigsaw, but you're the only one who can see all the pieces. You'll know what they want you to know, and what they don't want you to know, and even what they think no one knows.

That's old Twoflower, Rincewind thought. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany. He just looks at things, but nothing he looks at is ever the same again. Including me, I suspect.

Ach, noo yer talkin' oour language," said Rob Anybody. "Not…quite," said Tiffany.

the truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

Contrary to popular belief, fantasy is not about making things up. The world is stuffed full of things. It is almost impossible to invent any more. No, the role of fantasy as defined by G. K. Chesterton is to take what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it to the audience from a different direction, so that they look at it once again with new eyes.

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

The human mind was expert at filling in missing details and confidently turning them into facts, even if those facts were merely imagined.

When one hears hoofbeats, medical students are taught, one must think of horses, not zebras. But the doctor who sees my blood count will surely think of horses. He will arrive at a perfectly logical conclusion. It will no occur to him that, this time, it is truly a zebra galloping by.

Her technique was not perfect. Here and there he heard an off-pitch note, and her run of sixteenths was uneven. But her attack was fierce, her bow digging into the strings with such confidence that even her mistakes sounded intentional, every note played without apology.

There are many ways to tell the truth. It's an art.

The past closer, more comparable, a way to justify present action.