Quotes About Interpretation

If one person contends that there is no anti-Jewish teaching in the New Testament but another insists that there is, who's right? Who gets to speak? Unlike Nazi newspapers and KKK pamphlets, the New Testament prompts different reactions from people of goodwill. For

Instead of shepherds, Matthew presents the Magi, who, despite "we three kings of Orient are," are not necessarily three, not necessarily all men, certainly not kings, and most certainly not wise.

Our role as historians is to ask, "What would these stories have conveyed to the people who first heard them?" Our role as readers is also to ask, "What do these stories mean to me, and what have they meant to my community and to my tradition over time and across the globe?

There is little reason to argue over who has the correct reading here. Isaiah's words will mean, and should mean, different things to different people over time. Moreover, different translations necessarily give rise to different interpretations, and translation itself is an act of interpretation.

When the Evangelists mention a date and a place, they are telling us to pay attention, for time and space hold a surfeit of meaning.

Once we figure out the sign, whether of a pregnant woman, of a mother who has just given birth, of a newborn, even of baby clothes or a stable, our next step is to work out the symbolism, or what that sign "signifies.

People in the late first century, watching the Gospel of Luke performed, would be laughing. Try explaining, through hand motions, the angelic vision yourselves, and then try not to smile.

There are many versions of a story. Many sides and lenses that can distort, change, illuminate what is seen and unseen. What is heard and unheard. What is felt and unfelt. In the end, truth is but a facet of a diamond, a spark of ray from the sun, a forget-me-not flower seen from the eyes of a bee. What lives and breathes as reality is a perception, so who is to say what is possible and impossible?

And if you believe in God, I think She doesn't work that way either.

Como ler - essa é uma grande questão que vamos encontrando a toda hora nesse mergulho pelos livros essenciais. Ler criticamente é uma das respostas. Significa que não se lê para concordar servilmente em atitude reverente, mas também não se lê para discordar e refutar num eterno desafio.

Poetry is dancing with words.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

An aphorism is a generalization of sorts, and our present-day writers seem more at home with the particular.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them.

What a lot of books!" she screamed. "And have you really read them all, Monsieur Bonnard?" "Alas! I have," I replied, "and that is just the reason that I do not know anything; for there is not a single one of those books which does not contradict some other book; so that by the time one has read them all one does not know what to think about anything. That is just my condition, Madame.

I morti non hanno altra vita all'infuori di quella che i vivi attribuiscono loro»

Bonnard," I said to myself, "thou knowest how to decipher old texts; but thou dost not know how to read in the Book of Life. That giddy little Madame Trepof, whom thou once believed to possess no more soul than a bird, has expended, in pure gratitude, more zeal and finer tact than thou didst ever show for anybody's sake. Right royally hath she repaid thee for the log-fire of her churching-day!

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.

Whom do we speak to, and how do we encode our messages? How can we be heard or read, even after we are dead?

Does our reading life balance or subvert our waking life?

The mark of a good book is it changes every time you read it.

Art is a collarboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.

Finally, the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism