Edward W. Said  - Quotes

 All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation 

Tags: history   interpretation   knowledge     


Don DeLillo  - Quotes

 When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear. 

Tags: familiarity   interpretation   literature   novels   readers   reading   realism   reality   translation   writing     
Susan Sontag  - Quotes

 Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.  



John Locke  - Quotes

 I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts. 

Tags: actions   interpretation     
Marguerite Porete  - Quotes

 Theologians and other clerks,

You won't understand this book,

-- However bright your wits --

If you do not meet it humbly,

And in this way, Love and Faith

Make you surmount Reason, for

They are the protectors of Reason's house.
 

Tags: bible   feminism   interpretation   medieval   mystic   religion   theology     
Orson Scott Card  - Quotes

 The story is one that you and I will construct together in your memory. If the story means anything to you at all, then when you remember it afterward, think of it, not as something I created, but rather as something that we made together.  

Tags: interpretation   story     
Toba Beta  - Quotes

 A very single fact could emerge into many versions of truth,

depends on the number of eyewitnesses and interpretations.
 

Tags: fact   interpretation   truth     
Friedrich Nietzsche  - Quotes

 I have forgotten my umbrella.  

Tags: aphorism   derrida   interpretation   philosophy     
Susan Sontag  - Quotes

 Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.



Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)



The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.
 

Tags: criticism   interpretation     


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