Quotes About Interpretation

When I started off as a choreographer, I had to do songs, which I may have wanted to do differently, but directors had their own inputs to give. But now, I take liberty to decide my own dance steps as well.

Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.

The thing about stereotypes as we all know, there is often truth in them, but it's almost always a partial truth.

Because I do not know the names of things, I do not express them.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise — that which is common to you, me, and everybody.

While its proponents might get the facts wrong, they get the subjective experience right.

Sometimes the best way to communicate something is to explain what happens in the absence of it.

The critical question is whether preachers are supposed to help people "find their stories in the Bible" or are supposed to call the hearers, as George Lindbeck has suggested, to "make the story of the Bible their story."45

church has discovered that when it goes to the Scripture in faith, it finds itself encountered by Christ in ways that serve as the keys for understanding its encounters with Christ everywhere else.

Questioning a text is a creative, imaginative activity—something like brainstorming.

Exegesis can help us in many ways, but it finally cannot do what is most important: tell us what this text wishes to say on this occasion to our congregation. The preacher must decide this, and it is a risky and exciting decision. Getting

Chapter 7 takes a psychological truism, "we tend to believe what we think others believe" and turns it around: We tend to think others believe what we believe. This chapter examines a set of cognitive, social, and motivational processes that prompt us to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs, further bolstering our credulity.

By carefully scrutinizing and explaining away their losses, while accepting their successes at face value, gamblers do indeed rewrite their personal histories of success and failure. Losses are often counted, not as losses, but as "near wins.

Rather than simply ignoring contradictory information, we often examine it particularly closely. The end product of this intense scrutiny is that the contradictory information is either considered too flawed to be relevant, or is redefined into a less damaging category.

People are less aware, however, of another source of divergent beliefs—the fact that the same issue or situation is construed quite differently by different people, even people with the same tastes, values, and orientations. As social psychologist Solomon Asch noted many years ago, differences of opinion between people are not always linked to differences in their "judgment of the object," but often reflect differences in the very "object of judgment" itself.

To live, it seems, is to explain, to justify, and to find coherence among diverse outcomes, characteristics, and causes.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Silence can mock.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion

Symmetrical art is a closed form, perfect in itself and frozen in completeness; asymmetrical art invites the observer in, to expand his imagination and to become part of the process of creation.

Tanizaki's subject requires the shadowy style in which he treats it