Quotes About Interpretation

In my limited experience, women dreaded male statements that ended with "then you've got another think coming." It usually meant there was a lot more coming, but in this case there wasn't.

They have a saying, the Basque. That just because the cat has kittens in the oven, it doesn't make them biscuits.

They say statistics by their nature don't lie, but in my opinion they sometimes do and damnably at that.

Look . . ." I dreaded female statements that started with "look." In my limited experience, there was nowhere to hide after they were made.

I wanted to talk to her about Virgil's prophecy.

Using only nonnarrative portions of the Bible to interpret narrative is not only disrespectful to the narrative portions but also suggests a misguided approach to nonnarrative parts of the Bible.

The fact that our traditional method of extracting doctrine from Scripture does not work well on narrative does not mean that Bible stories do not send clear messages. Instead, it suggests that the way we apply our traditional method of interpretation is inadequate because we are ignoring too much of God's Word.

Batman doesn't have any superpowers. He's not superhuman. He's not super. So therefore he can't be a superhero.

That's what you do, right? When you're readin. You're seeing what it's like for other people.

because of cultural differences—different, deeply held beliefs and instincts about what is natural, normal, right, and good—cross-cultural interactions are subject to all manner of confusion, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation. In a word, they are often unsuccessful.

Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.

Whom one is speaking to - or which aspect of their character - fundamentally determines the meaning and consequences of an exhortation. 'Indulge Your Desires' comes across very differently on a billboard advertising SUVs than it does spray-painted across the broken windows of an SUV dealer. It follows that what you say is not nearly as important as how and when you say it.

People will see whatever they want to see. Parallax.

Good readers are flexible in their thinking and use different strategies for different types of reading.

They wait to be told what it is they have read. If no one does that, they just don't get it.

But my dad had argued that he didn't know the language of cars. To him, everything had its own language—the language of breakfast, the language of business, the language of politics, and on and on. In Spanish he knew all the languages, but for as long as he'd been speaking English, he believed he knew it only in certain realms.

I happen to like Philippians 4:6, but I also don't like how it is used as a "clobber verse" to make anxious people feel like they're doing something wrong or, even worse, that there is something wrong about them. As with most clobber verses, in this situation it is being used out of context.

And I am pretty sure that's the point of reading fiction -- so someone else can say in a way you never would have something you recognize immediately.

Jason tilts his head toward me, his hand moving slyly across his book. Stupid. Speech. Woman.

I imagined Dad beside me: "It's pretty," he'd say. "But pretty isn't enough for a great photograph. Show me why I care. What's the story?

I like art because there are no wrong answers. It's all about how you see the world. So you can be completely yourself" -Salma

Sometimes I can change how I feel about something by drawing it.

I work from a different theory. For everything there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?