Quotes About Interpretation

If you accept life dully, you can go through it moving not among things but among words.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Some things need no study, no learning, no repetition in pursuit of memory. They burn themselves into the eye and can be examined ever after in minute detail. Moreover it is their nature - as we cannot even think, without leaving a mark somewhere on the cosmos - to bring with them their own inescapable interpretation.

What's in a book is not what the author put into it, it's what the reader gets out of it.

But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid - that had to mean something.

You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. [ Inigo Montoya ]

The Serpent, to my interpretation, was pain.

La vie imite l'art, l'art imite la vie; parfois je suis incapable de les distinguer.

That explains it." Actually, of course, it didn't explain anything, but whenever doctors are confused about something, which is really more frequently than any of us would do well to think about, they always snatch at something in the vicinity of the case and add, "That explains it.

Actually, of course, it didn't explain anything, but whenever doctors are confused about something, which is really more frequently than any of us would do well to think about, they always snatch at something in the vicinity of the case and add, That explains it.

For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, 'Let me see now, just exactly when was that?' You ask him this: 'What was it like? How did you feel?' And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.

Da che esistono le donne, esistono i parrucchieri, e Adamo fu il primo, benché gli studiosi di Re Giacomo abbiano tentato di confondere le acque.

You keep using that word!" the Spaniard snapped. "I don't think it means what you think it does." "How

You keep that saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

But no serious student of the subject would claim that the constitutional grant of authority to Congress to regulate "commerce among the several states" was limited to the regulation of sailing ships and stagecoaches to the exclusion of steamboats, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes.

Every judge who has sat on a case involving a constitutional claim must have surely experienced the feeling that the particular law being challenged was either unjust or silly or vindictive. It is unfortunately all too easy to translate these visceral reactions into a determination to find some way to hold the law unconstitutional.

The framers reconciled in a somewhat rough-hewn way the need for an antimajoritarian institution such as the Supreme Court to interpret a written constitution within a broader system of government basically committed to majority rule.

So there are no nontheologians; there is just good theology and bad theology.

On one occasion Walter Brueggemann said, If you are a coward by nature, don't worry. We can still use you. You can get down behind the biblical text. You can peek out from behind the text, saying, 'I don't know if I would say this, but I do think the text does.' I like that image—the preacher hunkered down, taking cover behind the biblical text, speaking a word not of the preacher's devising.

The Bible's concern is not if we shall believe but what we shall believe.

Whether an observation is significant depends on what theories one already accepts.

If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.