Quotes About Interpretation

Because I am committed to the truth of Scripture, I must try to understand what Scripture says, even if it transcends my own experience.

You do have to listen to the stories, for stories always mean something. The question that worries me is: WHAT exactly do they mean?

This is the problem with stories. Stories always mean something. The question is ... What exactly do they mean?

I was thinking,' said Crusher dreamily [...] 'about LANGUAGE and how in English two negatives make a positive, but in spriteish, a double negative is still a negative. However there is NO language in which two positives make a negative ...' 'Yeah right, like THAT'S the problem,' said Xar, sarcastically. 'I hadn't thought of that!' said Crusher in gentle surprise [...]. 'You're correct, Car. Yeah, right IS a statement in English where two positives make a negative...

A mark is just a symbol, and symbols can change.

Eccentric doesn't bother me. Eccentric being a poetic interpretation of a mathematical term meaning something that doesn't follow the lines - that's okay.

It was as if, when her father spoke, her mother looked at him and saw a little goldfish, popping open his mouth over and over again but making no sound. And when her mother spoke, her father looked and saw a piranha doing the same thing.

After I'd told her – the mall, the taxi, Cross stroking my hair – she said, 'Did he kiss you?' 'John and Martin totally would have seen that,' I said, and as I felt myself implying the circumstances had prevented our kissing, I thought maybe this was why you told stories to other people – for how their possibilities enlarged in the retelling.

I have been granted the terrible privilege of deciding what would have happened with no one left to contradict me. And maybe I am absolutely wrong.

Perhaps, as was often the case with human interactions, it meant nothing.

Autocorrect can happen to anyone, but I seriously don't understand what goes on between him and his phone.

When you are the object of a person's affection, do you naturally credit him with a sympathetic heart and an understanding of the world? Perhaps your impression is right only insofar as it applies to you; in his presence, he is indeed possessed of these qualities for the very reason that you are the object of his affection. He is not observant so much as observant of you, not kind so much as kind toward you.

It is not a camera, or a reporter, that makes something, real and genuine; more often, a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

we create our own reality—that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to believe.

To be a good writer, become a good listener.

Among the hardest problems an art theory faces are questions about how to settle art's meaning through interpretation

If a viewer responds to Botticelli's Venus with an erotic desire, as if she is a pinup, he is actually not appreciating her for her beauty. And if someone enjoys looking at a Gauguin painting of Tahiti while fantasizing about going on vacation there, then they no longer have an aesthetic relation to its beauty.

How can something get you thinking the wrong way, if you know how to think the right way?' Sammy asked.

The rest of them were pretty sure they understood things, and that made them bad listeners.

She thought his sarcasms were unnecessary.

Their words were only accidents in the mutual silence.

God is only a great imaginative experience.

ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another.