Quotes About Interpretation

The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, and all professing to love liberty.

We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty... We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. --April 18, 1864 Address at Baltimore

L]iterature is always badly served when an author's artistic insight yields place to stereotype and malice. -Home and Exile

When I see it, this is what I see.

Before anything else, we have to say that President Jimmy Carter was a stand-up guy who had the misfortune of having a less than qualified interpreter with him. When Carter, on a visit to Poland, made a speech saying he wanted to know their people's "desires for the future," his interpreter wrongly said that President Carter desired Poland sexually.

_Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds.

It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.

We know from a later scrap of oral tradition that Europeans were often believed to have hoofs; not having seen shoes before, some Africans along the river thought them part of white anatomy.

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word 'myth' only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

You shall love the Lord your God . . . with all your might," the Tsenerene interprets to mean "with all your resources": "You should love God with your money. Your money should not be more beloved to you than a mitzvah." It goes on to tell the story

He had no idea who bought his books, how they acquired the money to buy them. Perhaps they were saints, perhaps they were criminals...

That the author is speaking only to us, that he is writing only for us, that no one on Earth has the same relationship to that author as we do. I have the same fantasy every time I read a book I love, no matter who wrote it, no matter when it was written. That the author has written his book only for me.

William Bedwell was both a leading mathematician and, because his readings in medieval mathematical studies had led him down this path, an Arabist, one of England's first. He was no admirer of Islam, being the author of a vituperative book on 'the blasphemous seducer Mohammed', but he was captivated by the theological, medical and mathematical genius of the Arabs. Arabic, he was also convinced, was an invaluable tool in the interpretation of Hebrew.

And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul's Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6:11–13: O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged. Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels. Nowe for a recompense in the same, (I speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged.

You are singing to the preacher, said J.Lo. Preaching to the choir, I corrected him. Yes. This thing.

Why did you attack some girl's boots? J.Lo looked incredulous. She is still mad about this? he huffed. I TOLD her-I THOUGHT they were ANKLEwolves. Okay, whatever. I- Why elsenow would a person wear fur with shortpants? It makes no sense!

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right? Didn't write any decent girl characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine. The

Walks all ass straw.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'The car. A classic. Ass-straw translates as star, I believe.

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.

It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights