Quotes About Interpretation

In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another...They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.

Chinese sometimes is fuzzy, but its beauty lies in its fuzziness.

I'm grateful to her. This habit women have - a role Helen often claimed not to want - of telling me what I'm feeling. Tremendously helpful. Like having an interpreter at hand to translate you to yourself.

The historian, on the contrary, cannot experiment and can rarely observe. Instead, the historian has to collect his own evidence, knowing, all the while, that some of it is useless and much of it unreliable." -Professor Charles Homer Haskins

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

In 1991, Warren Burger called the new interpretation of the Second Amendment "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word 'fraud,' on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.

was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.

The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible." And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it.

As soon as the curious Pequots came within range, the interpreter "pulls up his cock and let fly at one of them, and without question was the death of him."32 When

To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past.

Dreams give your soul wings. And images from dreams are the exquisite patterns on the wings. Hold your dream as you would hold a butterfly -- in your open, quiet palms. Make sure none of the delicate wing dust brushes off onto clumsy hands. Pinning the dream down with interpretation will tear the wings off the butterfly and kill it. .... Hold your dream images gently enough so that they still can fly.

In this kind of personal artwork, jettison any idea that you can help yourself or others by interpreting, praising, or criticizing. These kinds of creative pieces and experiences are only for being with. The only helpful response is to nourish the imagination and your piece by associating other images to it and noticing what feelings it evokes in you.

What would she have thought as a teenage girl arranging her artfully wasted limbs against the dais of a highly conceptual sculpture?

WHEN IT WAS DECIDED (When was that again, and by whom?) that we were all supposed to choose between fiction and nonfiction, what was not taken into account was that for some of us truth can never be an absolute, that there can (at best) be only less true and more true and sometimes those two collapse inside each other like aTurducken.

Father-in-law comes to stay, goes to local church and returns saying he will spend the rest of his life translating New English Bible back into English.

Arabic science throughout its golden age was inextricably linked to religion; indeed, it was driven by the need of early scholars to interpret the Qur'an.

We must learn to interpret our experiences by what we know about God through His Word instead of interpreting what God is like by our experiences. If we do not ground our belief about the nature of God and His disposition to us in the Scriptures, we will reject much of what He says about Himself when we face difficulty.

I see words, I read them.

I think of poetry and how I see it as just a raw block of stone ready to be shaped, that way words are never a horrible limit to me, just tools to shape.

I think that there are changes that have occurred in technology that make is that more people can have the same level of information that I have. My advantage is that I'm very good at interpreting the information.

Communication is not so much about what you say, as what you don't say.

I show Dave the dummy for my book. He reads every bit of writing, looks at every picture, and asks no questions. When he's done, he wipes his hands on the book.

The old fun thing is when somebody typed up the first chapter of War and Peace. And then made a precis of the rest of it and sent it out and only one publisher recognized it.