Quotes About Interpretation

Is the good scientist allowed artistic license?

We're always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.

Kay Boyle said once that a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life. Most writers are good at one, not the other. But you are doing both so beautifully here.

The way liberals are interpreting the First Amendment today is that it prevents anyone who is religious from being in government. They say that violates the prohibition against church and state.

Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.

It is not just the information that is important. How it is presented is equally important.

loves to distort Scripture so he can use it to curse us.

Be careful to neither agree nor disagree with what anyone says until you (clearly) understand what he or she is saying.

The art of reading is to know and understand the things which go unsaid.

The art of reading is to know and understand the things which go unsaid. There is as much to be learned from the spaces between, the empty lines, as there is from the words on the page. I

As one leading Supreme Court scholar, Sanford Levinson, has noted, Supreme Court cases necessarily deal only with the "litigated Constitution," those provisions that are open to interpretation and become fodder for lawyers and judges.

When the Court has interpreted the Constitution, it has acted within the province of the Judicial Branch, which embraces the duty to say what the law is,

Was Hayburn's Case, then, the first instance of the Supreme Court declaring an act of Congress unconstitutional? Not formally.

What the narrator comes to realize is that the past "cannot be described objectively" and that her present will always mediate her past.

What was hard was discovering the true life of the poem inside its technical scaffolding.

She had come to think of the poet as song-maker, not as scholar with her head

Archaeology and memory are two ways of trying to retrieve and keep the past, both of them fallible, fascinating and doomed to be incomplete.

You could tell those two had been married by the way that she ignored him.

Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl.

I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.

A body of work may be reviled -- mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings -- and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.