Quotes About Interpretation

A terrorist for one man could be a patriot for another.

Jesus had told me to make Randall Terry gay.

To fans of British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, the Chilcot report should be read as a kind of Rorschach test - those experiments psychiatrists sometimes use to determine what their patients imagine they are seeing in the shapes of inkblots.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

Google is a global Rorschach test. We see in it what we want to see. Google has built an infrastructure that makes a lot of dreams closer to reality.

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

I didn't sound anything like Capote at the screen test. It was more like Bob Dylan. In his early years. With the flu.

Acting is a general thing; it's not like being a primary artist like a painter or writer which stands the test of time. I don't think acting stands the test of time, but it can capture the mood of the moment, which is in itself very exciting, but it rarely lasts.

If the script's good, everything you need is in there. I just try and feel it, and do it honestly. I also don't learn things for auditions, because I feel like it's just a test of memorizing rather than being real. Maybe every other actor would think that was terrible, I don't know. But it seems to have worked for me, so far.

Internet freedom is a bit of a Rorschach test: it means different things to different people.

Without a doubt, at the center of the New Testament there stands the Cross, which receives its interpretation from the Resurrection.

So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.

Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.

I'm one of those folks that look and say the Old Testament laid out clearly the path for Christ to come, but when He came, every scholar at that time missed it.

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.

As always, testing can only give you ideas on where you are. And it can also mislead you.

I often tell students that we should aspire to be amanuenses to the land: to let the land speak (in all its voices, human and otherwise), then take dictation, and try to get some of the words right. "How do you know when you get the words right?" they ask. "You know," I reply. When we do, the leaves not only speak; they positively sing.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

Everything that enters our field of perception means something, large or small. Everything speaks to us, if we will take off our headphones and hear a different sound track. Everything corresponds. We travel better in the forest of symbols when we are open and available to all the forms of meaning that are watching†and waiting for us.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

rectangular slab of mincemeat that everyone, including the servers, referred to as baked turd.