Quotes About Interpretation

What if the Christ and the Messiah come, and they're two different guys?

Far out, Bobby wrote back. Next thing I know, you'll be knitting socks with "Whistler's Mother.

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that anyway you turn them they are sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that anyway you turn them they are scrambled.

That's the value of artists, isn't it? Even when they aren't aware of it, they're dreaming our dreams for us.

Cartersian doubt (deliberate suspension of all interpretations of experience that are not absolutely certain)

They glared at her as if she were a piece of modern art at a county fair. A hostile sneer here, a puzzled laugh there...

How we shape our understanding of others' lives is determined by what we find memorable in them

then sang a musical version of the Lord's Prayer in a wavering, contralto voice with bluesy quarter-tone inflections. It was strange, haunting, beautiful. Even

However, one listing of common abbreviations compiled in 1859 includes 1 1 (dot dot, dot dot) for I AM READY; G A (dash dash dot, dot dash) for GO AHEAD, S F D for STOP FOR DINNER; G M for GOOD MORNING.

Your opinions are your symptoms.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice...

Thomasina (to Septimus) How is a ruined child different from a ruined castle? Septimus On such questions I defer to Mr Noakes. Noakes (out of his depth) A ruined castle is picturesque, certainly. Septimus That is the main difference. (to Brice) I teach the classical authors. If I do not elucidate their meaning, who will?

Mr Chater, you are a welcome guest at Sidley Park but while you are one, The Castle of Otranto was written by whomsoever I say it was, otherwise what is the point of being a guest or having one?

The 'role of the theatre' is much debated (by almost nobody, of course), but the thing defines itself in practice first and foremost as a recreation. This seems satisfactory. TOM STOPPARD 1993

Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch & interpret every sound in the universe.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

He read greedily but understood selectively, choosing the bits and pieces of other men's ideas that supported whatever predilection he had at the moment.

They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite that story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin.

Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was--that is research. The point is to dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

These and other inanimate things she saw and experienced. They were real to her. She knew them. They were the codes and touchstones of the world, capable of translation and possession. She owned the crack that made her stumble; she owned the clumps of dandelions whose white heads, last fall, she had blown away; whose yellow heads, this fall, she peered into. And owning them made her part of the world, and the world a part of her.

You looking good. Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad. He looked at her and the word bad took on another meaning.