#interpretation

The interpretation of dreams is a great art. ↗

— Paracelsus

#dreams #great #great art #interpretation

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience. ↗

— Dennis Quaid

#because #directing #director #directors #focus

Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth. ↗

— Albion W. Small

#analysis #attempt #century #implicit #interest

The trouble is, when you gift a girl with flowers your choice can be construed so many different ways. A man might give you a rose because he feels you are beautiful, or because he fancies their shade or shape or softness similar to your lips. Roses are expensive, and perhaps he wishes to show through a valuable gift that you are valuable to him. When a man gives you a rose what you see may not be what he intends. You may think he sees you as delicate or frail. Perhaps you dislike a suitor who considers you sweet and nothing else. Perhaps the stem is thorn, and you assume he thinks you likely to hurt a hand too quick to touch. But if he trims the thorns you might think he has no liking for a thing that can defend itself with sharpness. There's so many ways a thing can be interpreted. ↗

— Patrick Rothfuss

#interpretation #significance #the-ears-of-the-listener #beauty

A great number of elements in the characters’ lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. […] These characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both to the writer and the reader. When characters have their own will, their own autonomy, it gives the literary universe a greater internal mobility; it also makes the texts through which we view this world all the more open and incomplete. ↗

— Pierre Bayard

#interpretation #reading #communication

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#interpretation #words #education

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#interpretation #mind #soul #faith

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… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. ↗

— Edward W. Said

#human-society #interpretation #knowledge #nature

The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it. ↗

— Stephen Shore

#photography #photography

The attitude of the actor is his interpretation of what he reads, and the written word is what creates the role in the actor's mind, and I guess in reading the things that were given to me, I reacted as you guys saw me, you know. ↗

— Gene Barry

#attitude #creates #given #guess #guys