Quotes About Interpretation

Poetry is not always words.

Her asterisks are daft, postscripts redundant, and prose parenthetical.

If one looks closely enough, one can see angels in every piece of art.

I'm against people reading statements. When you read a statement, I automatically take it as though you can't talk, and it's not real.

If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the 'literariness' of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

We live in a world in which there is nothing that cannot be narrated, but nothing that needs to be either.

It sometimes is just the fear of being misunderstood.

If I'm anything, I'm not a singer, I'm a song stylist.

I have read many Catholic apologists who have tried to explain this away. Many of them are quite technical, whereas the pontiff's words seem simple and clear. I think any fair-minded reader of these words will come away with the idea that this pope believes the "blood of Christ" has redeemed atheists, whether they like it or not.

Ah! The English language was a wonderful thing! You could always find the right word. He only wished he could speak the language.

world of elliptical allusions and allegory. And a lot of what they wrote was designed

Memory is not history, even though memories may be among the evidence a historian examines in constructing a historical past.

Memoirs, as everyone knows, make bad history.

the issue in historical explanation is to explain the character and not the mere occurrence of events. A historical event is not an atomic, isolated, permanent thing but (as we have seen) an "identity" or "historical individual" constructed by the historian.

A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him? I make no suggestion that one side or other is right, but observation over many years leads me to believe it is true.

You say we worship the sun; so do you.

Colour is a matter of personal opinion.

How can a river that rises in a black forest and discharges in a black sea be celebrated as blue?

The mistake of man is that he always seeks explanations which uphold his view of the world.

Expositional listening is listening for the meaning of a passage of Scripture and accepting that meaning as the main idea to be grasped for our personal and corporate lives as Christians.

There is no such thing as music note by note just as there is no such thing as a book word by word. We have to accept that things are ambiguous," Sebök said to one of the students on the last day of the master class. Is there any more fundamental lesson that we must learn as we mature? As my friend had told me, he might have been talking about all of life, not just music.

Now I'm not dumb, but I can't understand how she walks like a woman but talks like a man..." Th Kinks

The speech of man is like embroidered tapestries, since like them this too has to be extended in order to display its patterns, but when it is rolled up it conceals and distorts them.