Quotes About Interpretation

Nothing is black and white. There are no universal standards that determine what's good and what's evil. It's subjective.

It is possible to greatly disagree on the meaning of the symbols in the book of Revelation, yet agree entirely and substantially on the matter of Christ's coming and kingdom.

I do not believe that either the preterist view of interpreting Revelation, which regards the book as almost entirely fulfilled, or the futurist view, which regards it as almost entirely unfulfilled, are to be implicitly followed. The truth, I expect, will be found to lie somewhere between the two.

The very conventions of poetry were devised to encode experience, to make it less obvious and thereby more true. To make a metaphor, after all, is to describe something in terms of what it is not , the better to apprehend what it is .

Hell's different things to different people and different things to the same person at different times.

To show her how carefully I was listening, I would tell her story back to her, in my own words, and venture what I thought the meaning might be. She loved this.

Do you know why God invented writers? Because He loves a good story. And He doesn't give a damn about words. Words are the curtain we've hung between Him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don't strain for the perfect sentence. There's no such thing. Writing is guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the reader's as much as yours. Think about that the next time you curl a piece of paper into your typewriter.

Do you know why God invented writers? Because he loves a good story. And he doesn't give a damn about the words. Words are the curain we've hung between him and our true selves. Try not to think about the words. Don't strin for the perfect sentence. There's no such thing. Writing si guesswork. Every sentence is an educated guess, the readers as much as yours.

She could say 'no' quicker than any woman I ever knew, and none of them ever meant 'yes'.

Walt Whitman said, "To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

Dos hombres miran hacia el exterior a través de los mismos barrotes; uno ve el fango, el otro, las estrellas. Frederick Langbridge

There is no right reaction. There is only your reaction.

Islam is a religion, just as Christianity is a religion. Islamism is the idea that a certain interpretation, any interpretation, of Islam must be imposed on society at large. It's a political movement, a totalitarian movement, with Islam as its vehicle, with the goal of eventually creating the Khilafah.

You can use charts to give you a plus or minus toward your view, but you can never start with the chart.

Guys are open books; wives can read them without breaking a sweat. They're just little boys who love being bad.

He's got to have the ability, and it seems to be fairly rare, to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been. What we mean is the eye of an artist.

If you see the world in black and white, you're missing important grey matter.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

I could see everything she said as if it were a wall painting inside the cave of my own skull.

It's sometimes a blessing that great historical figures don't live to see what people do to their visions.

Each time we come to a book we give it a different reading because we bring a different person to it. It is not you who reads the book, the book reads you.

He revels in obscure words, as in his list of phobias including pteronophobia (tickling with feathers), xenoglossophobia (foreign languages), scorodophobia (garlic), as well as in his tour through various techniques of divination, including geloscopy (the interpretation of laughter), bletonism (analyzing currents of water), and sciomancy (shadows or ghosts).

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays notes that there is not "an exact equivalent for 'homosexual' in either Greek or Hebrew."22 The Bible, in its original Hebrew and Greek, has no concept like our present understanding of a person with a homosexual orientation. Indeed, the concept of an ongoing sexual attraction to people of one's own sex did not exist in European or American language until the late nineteenth century.23