Quotes About Interpretation

This was the story he told himself, and the stories we tell ourselves long enough become our truths.

Myth took the place of objectively conceived history. Myth, Michel Tournier has said, is "history everyone already knows."2 As such, history becomes nothing but a tool of the present, with no integrity whatsoever of its own.

when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's in reading that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book becomes one of a million different books[…]

People often ask me if I am the book's Pakistani protagonist. I wonder why they never ask if I am his American listener. After all, a novel can often be a divided man's conversation with himself.

How odd it would be to call Homer's Iliad or Rumi's Masnavi "the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.

the meaning clear, but the judgment suspended, and left the matter at that.

what is natural in one place can seem unnatural in another, and some concepts travel rather poorly, if at all.

stories of evil can be projected on them with as little difficulty as stories of good.

I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you—an American—will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It's

ambitious cleric position: "Religion makes us all equal; only I decide what religion says.

an old woman told them they had not seen a fox but rather themselves, their love. They wondered if she meant the fox was a living symbol or the fox was unreal and just a feeling and when others looked they would see no fox at all.

Our eyes all have the same mechanism, yet each of us sees so differently.

Behold the hands, how they promise, conjure, appeal, menace, pray, supplicate, refuse, beckon, interrogate, admire, confess, cringe, instruct, command, mock and what not besides, with a variation and multiplication of variation which makes the tongue envious.

We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things.

Faccio dire agli altri quello che non posso dire altrettanto bene, sia per insufficienza del mio linguaggio sia per insufficienza del mio sentimento.

All is a-swarm with commentaries; of authors there is a dearth.

Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments—the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language.

The reader who fails to ponder, or at least mark, the words he does not understand is headed for disaster.

The beauty of any work of art is related to the pleasure it gives us when we know it well.

Find and interpreting the important words.

É um erro acreditar que ler muito e ler bem são a mesma coisa.

O esclarecimento só ocorre quando, além de saber o que o autor escreveu, você também sabe o que ele quis dizer com o que escreveu e por que escreveu o que escreveu.