Quotes About Interpretation

Women are not difficult; but they are difficult to understand. Men are not easy; but they are easy to understand.

The Sira is the interpretation of the Sura

He directed her attention to another question: "When I speak to you in your language, what happens to mine? Does my language continue to speak, but in silence?

When a politician says 'yes', it really means 'may be', when he/she says 'may be', it really means 'no'. If a politician says 'no', it means that he/she is not a real politician.

What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway

Overall, my books represent a kind of shared communion and meditation with my fellow human beings… The books are also a part of what I call the great continuum of spiritual literary dialogue that I feel has been in progress since human beings first gave in to the urge to pray to their sense of something greater than themselves and interpreted certain signs or events or silences as responses to those prayers.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art, and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

The domain of Calvinism is indeed far broader than the narrow confessional interpretation would lead us to suppose.

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.

A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.

Big Ammachi wants Philipose to ask Koshy Saar if this Moby-Dick isn't all made up. "It's entertaining. But isn't it one big lie? Ask him." Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

I reflect that all art, all beauty, is reflection.

She emoted more by blinking than I did in the entirety of my sixth-grade class play

When you see a Gauguin, you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.

This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.

The human authors and editors of the Old Testament brought their own experiences and presuppositions to the task of writing. We don't often think about this when we read the Bible.

We do our best to hear from God, but we are all a bit spiritually hard of hearing. Our own convictions sometimes get intermingled with what we believe God is saying to us. None of us knows everything. We're all shaped by our environment and limited in our understanding. We do our best to hear from God, but we hear God through our individual filters, our preconceived ideas and convictions. This

literature is a fiction that tells a deeper truth

Since bad timing could mean almost anything, it was a certain kind of truth. A low kind.

Most people ignore most poetry because Most poetry ignores most people.

genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood

No amount of "evidence" or research will convince the unamused that a joke is funny.