Quotes About Interpretation

The transposition of two Letters by five placeings will be sufficient for 32 Differences [and] by this Art a way is opened, whereby a man may expresse and signifie the intentions of his minde, at any distance of place, by objects … capable of a twofold difference onely,

Everything cannot be conveyed by ballet, only those things which can be shown on the stage.

There should not need to be a synopsis in the program. The movements and the music should express everything the audience needs to know.

If you like something of someone else's, why not take it? The important thing is that it seem natural and fit in.

Choreography is like cooking or gardening. Not like painting because painting stays. Dancing disintegrates. Like a garden. Lots of roses come up, and in the evening they're gone.

Dance has to look like the music. If you see music simply as an accompaniment, then you don't hear it. I occupy myself with how not to interfere with the music.

When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, "What do you mean? What is your significance?" Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful. We're like flowers. A flower doesn't tell you a story. It's in itself a beautiful thing.

See the music, hear the dance.

We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

The problem with communication is the illusion that is has occurred.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.

Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways?

Meow" means "woof" in cat.

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can not expect an apostle to peer out.

When a young man complains that a young lady has no heart, it is a pretty certain sign that she has his.

Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling; The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel.

Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.

A successful interpretive language both tolerates ambiguity and takes advantage of it. "A language which has maximum compression would actually be completely unsuited to conveying information beyond a certain degree of complexity, because you could never find out whether a text is right or wrong," von Neumann explained