Quotes About Interpretation

Allander smiled. "Well, if he doesn't tell me nothing then he would, in fact, be telling me something. A double negative makes a positive. Your advice isn't concordant with your desires.

We don't need to get into all that right now," Darby continued. "I'm sure Mr. Marlow can read between the lines. Anything else, Mr. Marlow?" Jade noticed that her tone had changed. Though she was still polite, her warmth had departed.

Whether the glass is half empty or half full depends on if you're drinking from it or filling it." Milt Carp in Dollarapalooza

When the New Testament tells us that this or that "household" (as many English translations put it) was baptized in connection with Christian faith, what would the first hearers have thought?

The meaning of your communication is the response you get.

Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction. Double description is better than one.

The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

All experience is subjective.

All right, he thought, so the details were not perfect. But maybe, in a sense, that was part of the magic, too.

Definitions, her grandmother once said, had to be like a fat man's belt - big enough to cover the subject but elastic enough to allow for change. The Sunborn

Men reveal what they think when they look away, and what they feel when they hesitate. With women, it's the other way around

You confuse not speaking with not listening.

we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings.

Just as Bob Dylan's true audience may be those who came before him, those he's trying not to dishonor when he sings their songs or makes those songs into new ones, it may be his true biography is his inhabiting of other lives.

Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

Art doesn't explain itself.

There is always a social explanation for what we see in art," Albert Camus said in 1947. "Only it doesn't explain anything important.

Some forms of music spark the freedom of singers to say, in words or how words are sung, in pace, hesitation, timbre, shouts, or silences, what they most deeply and desperately want to say; other forms take it away.

On the stage, you alone hold the key, and on the night you have to trust that the director has inspired you enough to take the material and run with it.

One man's daydreaming is another man's novel.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Life is not only measured by what happens to us. It is measured by the way in which we interpret what happens to us.

both spiritual teachers and preachers fall into the trap of using imprecise, emotional mumbo jumbo—if you can't define it or explain it, then it's mumbo jumbo—to connect with an audience. The audience reads into it what they want, and it makes for good theater.

in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation.