Quotes About Interpretation

never wrote a tune in my life," he said.137 "What do you mean by that?" asked Robins, surprised. "Those tunes are all in the air," Monroe replied. "I just happened to be the first one to pick them out.

He didn't say that. He was reading what was given to him in a speech.

ER also helps students move away from a word-by-word approach to reading. It helps them to look for the general meaning of what they read. They can ignore any details they do not fully understand.

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

Sentences that begin with 'You' are probably not true. For instance, when I write: "You are a pet human named Morlock being disciplined by your master, a Beowulf cluster of FreeBSD 22.0 servers in the year 2052. Last week you tried to escape by digging a hole under the perimeter, which means this week you may be put to sleep for being a renegade human." That's not true, at least not yet.

we see patterns in the world where there are none because we don't understand just how un-random-looking random sequences can be.

Every biblical story reflects something that mattered to its author. Whenever we figure out what it was and why it mattered, we move a step closer to knowing who wrote a part of the Bible.

Richard Elliott Friedman

One man's piety is often another man's poison.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

A friend came over to the house a few days ago and read one of my poems. He came back today and asked to read the same poem over again. After he finished reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.

It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

If for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.

The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.

We will go on producing myths, ways of explaining ourselves to ourselves but, like everything else about us, they are in constant transition and we must not fundamentalise any of them.

Their books weren't ink marks on paper but God himself compressed between covers. No wonder they often ended up fighting with each other over who had the best words and the best symbols for God.

The writer is a kind of tuning-fork for a melody yet to be composed.

There are really no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.

It was like so, but wasn't.

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.