Quotes About Interpretation

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

A chemical semaphore passes through Nick's brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art.

As always in biology, the problem was to know what you were looking at.

does not even try to give us complete information about the events around us—it gives information about the correlations between

If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!

We see what we are ready to see, expect to see, and even desire to see.

It's not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences.

To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

For all who have tried to know Jesus without Christ, many of the core church teachings offered a disembodied Christ without any truly human Jesus, which was the norm for centuries in doctrine and in art. Art is the giveaway of what people really believe at any one time.

reality itself, our reality, my limited and sometimes misinterpreted experience, still becomes the revelatory place for God.

What Richard does is more like what Jesus did when he spoke in parables: He takes you to see from one angle, and then backs up and brings you to see from another angle, and then another, and then another, until a whole new way of seeing begins to dawn on you.

Much of patriarchal Christian interpretation has been trying to avoid pain, trying to avoid being poor, trying to avoid powerlessness. That's why we couldn't hear Jesus. If we had had an image of God as the great mother who is giving birth—as in Romans 8:22—I think history as process, pain, patience, guided destiny would have come more naturally. As it is, we have seen history as a linear obstacle course, something to be conquered, exploited and won. A

Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?

A writer has to see things twice. First the thing itself, then its potential for a story. What he sees this second time is, in a sense, who he is. It's his artistic personality. What he doesn't see twice is just as revealing.

They got their own name in French," she reminded Miss Beryl, stealthily exchanging her soiled cloth napkin for a fresh one at an adjacent table. "Escargot." There's also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn't mean God intended for you to eat it.

It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn't much better.

Maybe the bad things didn't mean anything, as my father said, but in my head they kept trying to.

We're not copying life, we're making a comment on it.

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.

Every man, it seems, interprets the world in the light of his habits and desires