Quotes About Texts

Archaeological and material evidence is at least free from the constraints of narrative. Archaeologists have indeed sometimes been dismissive of written sources (this was a trend of the 1980s in particular), which only preserve attitudes of literate and thus restricted élites, whereas archaeological excavations and surveys uncover real life, often of the peasantry, who are badly served by texts.

We have read as many texts as possible.

la palabra «teología» el regusto de una ciencia de la vida (y es tal vez la consecuencia de que, en los países latinos especialmente, estos textos sean percibidos como la más insólita y verdadera impertinencia).

In his eyes Hobbes, who had savaged the Church in Leviathan (1651), was unambiguously wicked, and excluding him was a pleasure. He told his friend Thomas Tyers that he had 'scorned' to quote Hobbes 'because I did not like his principles'.6 Among the texts he did cite, however, was John Bramhall's 1658 Castigations of Mr Hobbes, a book now known, if at all, for having been praised by T. S. Eliot. For

a whole series of arguments and texts showing that war—that is, the wounding and

Genre is a useful thing when organizing texts in a bookshop but immaterial to the particular exchange between writer and reader.

When he spoke, he illuminated a truth I had always yearned for and yet always run from. I am known as an authority on the holy texts, and yet when he spoke, I realized I knew nothing. And what I did know, I had cloaked in my own selfish interpretations. In so doing, I had turned the truth into lies.

Art is a way into other realities, other personalities. When I let myself be affected by a book, I let into myself new customs and new desires. The book does not reproduce me, it re-defines me, pushes at my boundaries, shatters the palings that guard my heart. Strong texts work along the borders of our minds and alter what already exists. They could not do this if they merely reflected what already exists.

Tackling Old Testament ethics is a challenge. Besides a lot of territory to cover, the ancient Near East seems so strange and even otherworldly! We need a good bit of background discussion to help make better sense of this world and of certain Old Testament texts.

Contemporary fantasists all bow politely to Lord Tennyson and Papa Tolkien, then step around them to go back to the original texts for inspiration--and there are a lot of those texts. We have King Arthur and his gang in English; we've got Siegfried and Brunhild in German; Charlemagne and Roland in French; El Cid in Spanish; Sigurd the Volsung in Icelandic; and assorted 'myghtiest Knights on lyfe' in a half-dozen other cultures. Without shame, we pillage medieval romance for all we're worth.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

In my own pursuits I have drawn heavily from four traditional yoga texts: the Siva Samhita, the Goraksa Sataka, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines as translated by Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup.

I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.

Derrida's texts aren't located "outside" the texts they examine, in a position of attempted mastery or privileged authority. He doesn't simply reject or oppose them. It's more a strategy of inhabiting them, making a destabilizing passage through them, undoing their presuppositions and desedimenting them: stirring up their underlying levels.

Everyone stared at me now. I'd studied linguistics a long time ago. A little philology too, the study of languages from analyzing texts. Mostly for the fun of it, but the subject came in useful sometimes. Ellis

I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal....It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time.

The odd conjuncture of psychoanalysis with literature dramatizes the perplexing deconstructions and inversions that can occur as Theory, capital T, meets "primary" texts in classrooms.

Texts are musical in that they take time, and the time texts take is musical time. The time of music and the time of texts always involve reaching for the next moment. Music is always moving toward the next note, and we are always reading beyond the individual word. Each sentence compels us to move forward; each paragraph carries us along to the denouement.

Human beings poison religion, imposing their prejudices, superstitions, and corruptions onto its rituals and texts, not the other way around.

Using "the spy-glass of Anthropology," her work celebrates rather than moralizes; it shows rather than tells, such that "both behavior and art become self-evident as the tale texts and hoodoo rituals accrete during the reading.

Judaism is not, and never has been, a single stream of thought, but a river formed of many, often contradictory, streams, and rabbinic texts are composites of different kinds of thinking.

The would-be Sufi needs guidance precisely because books, texts, while telling you what is needed, do not tell you when.

I hate being overwhelmed with 8 texts at once!

The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own.