Quotes About Interpretation

Infinite Jest is a masterpiece," Harvey had said. "Infinite Jest is an endurance contest. You manage to get through it and you have no choice but to say you like it. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that you just wasted weeks of your life," A.J. had countered.

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so that

In this world, to be overly literal is a profound weakness.

All stories—anecdotes, cave paintings, blog posts, book reviews, news articles, songs, poems—are attempts to explain the world to each other and for ourselves.

The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.

The historian amputates reality.

Did you read the book or did you just read the words in order?

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

They had been mistaken, it seemed, in seeking other tongues. Languages were not a special capacity, as she had once imagined, but incautious assent to the wrong kinds of meanings. A

Don't you think every face tells its own story? Like a book? More like a poem. If you study it long enough, you'll soon find its meaning.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound, and when you understand it, it is only ridiculous.

There are two versions to every poem – the crying version and the straight version

Unless there is a suitable faulty developed in the audience's mind, the speaker will not be understood. So the teacher/speaker should not get irritated when her student/audience takes long time to understand or perceive reality.

Yours is much worse than Eastern! You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own invention, and are calling it fiction!

Men always look differently at women, even if it's not your intention it is wrongly interpreted as such.

Another issue was language, the problem of expressing these themes in language and the problem of how much one can articulate in language.

Obviously it was meant to tell us nothing, which is exactly the opposite function of a book.

What else is a poem about? The rhythm and the images buried in the language. All the ways you can build an emotion with words, but you can't just write 'I feel sad.' I mean, you can, but it's not poetry... I think it has to be experienced instead of studied. You step into it.

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

Preacher: "This is the word of God!" Constantine: "The edited word of God

Often, I get the feeling that the story is really happening somewhere and all I'm doing is trying to work out the best way to tell it.

The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

Gestures are all that I have; sometimes they must be grand in nature.

It's so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There's presentation and there's interpretation and they're so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult.