Quotes About Interpretation

If you look at it from another point of view, words can be very confusing. Because they are often beautiful and we have so many of them and although they are very powerful they have no will of their own, we can use them without permission-wildly, madly and get into terrible muddles.

Art is the illusion of spontaneity.

The police called it choking, but I called it a two-handed neck hug. That's how I knew she really loved me.

The truth is like a nipple: the more you twist it, the more somebody is going to get hurt.

Artists exist to show us the world. So do windows.

And what do the poets have to say about it? — They only lie!

The text you print and the text you read can become an important API.

Beware of situations where there is no alternative to parsing text messages! If the information isn't available in other ways, people will parse any textual output generated by your code.

People often make the mistake of believing that profound quotes were intended to be all-encompassing. Anti-proverbs, while comical, do not necessarily diminish the insight gained from words of wisdom.

Every Christian in every age has been tempted to paper over scripture's cracks, explain away its oddities, show it's no different or more demanding than what we hearers already think we know about God and the world. This is a mistake. Scripture is spectacularly odd.

Modern, technique-based ways of reading have their place, but reading scripture is not complete until the church loves God and neighbor more.

If you can read the Song of Songs without blushing a little, you're doing it wrong, and Origen wants us to do more than blush.

The key to interpretation, as Augustine once told Deogratias, is your delight as an interpreter. Your delight is what your listeners will notice. It is what will return you to the text for more. It is what has a chance to draw in your hearers. It is the tether God has left in your soul with which to draw you to God's self, and others through you.

understood to another person is essentially a problem of cryptology.

When you just copy and paste, you miss that. You just repurpose the last layer instead of understanding all the layers underneath.

If the Protestant Reformation sought to remove the Catholic Church as an mediator between the individual and God, Hermetic magic sought to go one further, and provide techniques to directly plug an individual into the mind of God itself, not just handing over the right of individual interpretation of scripture but a direct connection to the source of scripture.

A picture can say 1000 words but it can also inspire you to write 1000 more.

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

I hate movies that tell people what to think. I'm proud that Democrats thought 'Thank You For Smoking' was their film and Republicans thought it was theirs. I'm proud that pro-choice people thought 'Juno' was their film and pro-life people thought it was theirs.

I don't want to make films that give you the answer. If there is a message to my films - and I hope there isn't - it's to be open-minded.

My father wants to take your favorite song and play it better than you've ever heard. I want to take your least favorite song and play it so good that you like it.

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.