Quotes About Interpretation

What we mean when speaking of myth in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can't.

Thomas C. Foster

Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.

Much of what we think about literature, we feel first.

Rather, a reader's imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

Even if the writer told you his intent, as a group they're notorious liars and not to be trusted.

That's what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.

reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.

The question always is, what does misfortune really tell us?

We want strangeness in our stories, but we want familiarity, too. We want a new novel to be not quite like anything we've read before. At the same time, wee look for it to be sufficiently like other things we've read so that we can use those to make sense of it.

Different: no guilty party exists in the narrative (unless you count the author, who is present everywhere and nowhere).

Own the books you read. Also poems, stories, flash fiction, plays, memoirs, movies, creative nonfiction, and all the rest. ... take ownership of your reading. It's yours. It's special. It is exactly like nobody else's in the whole world.

I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments; some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots.

Nous vivons la période de la mort de la mort de l'auteur.

As fine a document as the Constitution is, the Antifederalists, who were not frivolous men, raised some prescient criticisms. Patrick Henry was concerned that the "general welfare" clause would someday be interpreted to authorize practically any federal power that might be imagined.

When examining evidence relevant to a given belief, people are inclined to see what they expect to see, and conclude what they expect to conclude. Information that is consistent with our pre-existing beliefs is often accepted at face value, whereas evidence that contradicts them is critically scrutinized and discounted. Our beliefs may thus be less responsive than they should to the implications of new information

We must recognize that our view of the world is just that - a view that has been shaped by our own vantage point, history, and idiosyncratic knowledge.

If we want to understand the actions of other people, we have to understand how they interpreted their circumstances and the choices they faced--not the way we would interpret them or, rather, the way we think we would interpret them if we were in their shoes.

We tend to resolve our perplexity arising out of the experience that other people see the world differently than we see it ourselves by declaring that these others, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral defect, are unable to see things "as they really are" and to react to them "in a normal way." We thus imply, of course, that things are in fact as we see them, and that our ways are the normal ways. (Ichheiser, 1949, p. 39)

some evidence has accumulated that people who habitually fail to put the most favorable cast on their circumstances run the risk of depression.

In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

A novel is an impression, not an argument.

Tis my belief she's a very good woman at bottom." "She's terrible deep, then.

Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.