Interpretation of Meaning Quotes

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

When articulation is impossible, gesticulation comes to the rescue.

I think I prefer for the listener to decide for themselves what stuff means, because I always hate it when I think a song is about a horse, and then it turns out to be about a damn trip to France.

It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.

Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special.

Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.

How wrong are those simpletons, of whom the world is full, who look more at... color than at the figures which show spirit and movement.

Some persons never attain to the happy art of perspicuous expression, and it is equally true that some persons, thro' a mental defect of their own, will judge the most correct and certain language of others to be indefinite and ambiguous.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred; they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.

Once you train an audience to look for significance, they start to find it everywhere.

Meaning is like pornography, you know it when you see it.

Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson's twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.

It's the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I'll have to pass.