Quotes About Interpretation

He wanted an answer, a simple, uncomplicated set of words wrapped around an idea he could accept. His companion's answer, however, told him there was nothing simple or uncomplicated about his question, no matter how straight-forward it might have seemed to him.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of fiction? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

The best books are those whose readers think they could have written them.

What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

She saw the world through a dazzling prism of authentic imagination.

my folks wouldn't read a book if you put a gun to their dicks. but they read people all day long and always get it right.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Communication appears to be deceptively easy. However, most of us carry a major misconception about the process: that communication is primarily message sending. Communication does not take place until someone receives the message and understands it as the sender intended. The most eloquent speech or the most beautifully composed letter isn't a successful communication if it misses the mark.

A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.

Is she crazy?" "No," he said simply. "But sometimes her sanity is terrifying.

What you say, when you say a word. What you think when you say it. What I see and hear when you speak. Words are ancient; visions and echoes cling to them like barnacles on the whale's back. You speak words used in poetry and song since the beginning of the world we know. Here, you will learn to hear and to speak as if you had never listened, never spoken before. Then you will learn the thousand meanings within the word. What you say when you say fire.

The fact that the doctrine makes perfect sense even though Epiphanius keeps finding it incoherent suggests that he is giving a faithful account of it.

You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.

Sav svoj novac je trošila na kupovinu knjiga, a sve vrijeme na njihovo ?itanje. Sve su bile ispisane kritikama, odgovorima na marginama, ponekad su me?u njih bile umetnute ?itave stranice komentara. Šunjala se kroz stolje?a pisanja, ostavljaju?i svoj znak kud god bi išla.

I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and birdcalls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine.

If the Bible says something once, notice it but don't count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.

It is one of the curiosities of Western intellectual history that, during the last century or so, those with no serious involvement with practical Christianity—maybe totally ignorant of it or even hostile to it—have been allowed, under the guise of "scholarship" or innovative thought, to define what religion is and to reinterpret Christian teachings in the light of their own biased definitions and purposes.

that it was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

Jesus and his words have never belonged to the categories of dogma or law, and to read them as if they did is simply to miss them.

Anthropologists observe that the world occupied by a human being comprises not only the surrounding land, water, sky, plant and animal life, human beings and works of human hands, but also a "symbolic reality," which is superimposed upon material reality.