Quotes About Interpretation

People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.

Juanita believes that nothing is provably true or provably false in the Bible. Because if it's provably false, then the Bible is a lie, and if it's provably true, then the existence of God is proven and there's no room for faith.

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo. "You spoke crooked words and I straightened them

When later generations come to read about our history they will think they are reading a romance, and not believe a word of it.

We can't run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness.

It registered on the mind as a blunt impression that could be talked about only by smearing it into some gray word like "complicated.

As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

It didn't matter whether "football" for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets.

But when I tried to meet her eye now, she pointedly looked away, and fixed her red and swollen eyes on the big stained-glass window above the slate. Since (a) it was dark outside and (b) the window depicted Saunt Grod and his research assistants being beaten with rubber hoses in the dungeons of some Praxic Age spy bureau and (c) Tulia had already spent something like a quarter of her life in this room, I reckoned that inspecting the window wasn't really the point.

the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives.

But this is how history is done now. People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.

I don't get this, Hiro says. What is Snow Crash? It's a drug, asshole, the guy says. What do you think?

Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs.—What's the difference?

Hiro, you are such a geek. She's a woman, you're a dude. You're not supposed to understand her. That's not what she's after. ... She doesn't want you to understand her. She wants you to understand yourself. Everything else is negotiable.

It was hard to tell whether he was looking at a water heater, an abandoned refrigerator, or a human being. When it moved a little, he decided the latter

If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it.

You know what, though? It's all entertainment. Real or made up. It's stuff that people watch on screens or varps. Red gets that.

As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Reader

But it's easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people.

My eyes skimmed over the legalese and bureaucratese (two languages I had never mastered), until I found something descriptive to

Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated—the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind." "Like instructions for programming a VCR.

Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror.

A man is talking on the phone in Cantonese, which means that he is, in fact, shouting.