Quotes About Interpretation

Psychologists call this "motivated reasoning." Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim, conscious or unconscious, of reaching a particular kind of conclusion. In a football game, we see the fouls committed by the other team but overlook the sins of our own side. We are more likely to notice what we want to notice.11

the diagram "is to affect thro' the Eyes what we may fail to convey to the brains of the public through their word-proof eyes.

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy too.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.

and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Still

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around" (p89 "Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong")

If a story seems moral, do not believe it.

when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

To this day, while I admire poetic opacity in certain authors and filmmakers, I cannot tolerate it in my own work. You may or may not like something I've written, but I'll do my damnedest to ensure that you know what I wanted to say.)

What others might dismiss as the vagaries of fate, my father interpreted as dancing lessons from the Divine.

The assumption that Derrida always knows what he is talking about is not Derridean.

The more we analyze, the more ambiguous things become.

Writing about music really is like dancing about architecture--and a good thing, too. Everything is like that.

A certain degree of audiovisual hallucination happens when we read poetry.

Some time around 1932, Adolf Loos, the noted Viennese architect, said, "There is a great difference between an urn and a chamber pot, and in this difference there is leeway for culture.

Attacks on the principles of the Declaration began at an early point in American history. In the four decades before the Civil War, defenders of slavery explicitly rejected it, even calling it, as Senator John Pettit did in 1854, "a self-evident lie."63 Horrified by this, antislavery politicians rallied to the Declaration. They developed a constitutional interpretation that emphasized liberty and equality, and they denounced slavery as incompatible with the

Learn about art, Captain," Thrawn said, his voice almost dreamy. "When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.

If di-Master Strinni knew any sort of sign language, it would be the Human variety.

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people.