Quotes About Interpretation

When I ask my elders about the ways our people lived in order to keep the world whole and healthy, I hear the mandate to take only what you need. But we human people, descendants of Nanabozho, struggle, as he did, with self-restraint. The dictum to take only what you need leaves a lot of room for interpretation when our needs get so tangled with our wants.

We are all products of our worldviews - even scientists who claim objectivity.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

My gramma used to think that passage when Jesus said, 'In my Father's house are many rooms,' didn't mean there was a big hotel in heaven. It meant there were lots of different ways to worship.

study. Something you can write up for the American Society of Shrinks—otherwise known

They weren't bad books," Phin countered patiently. "They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a 'good book' for someone.

All books are good,' he said... 'They weren't bad books,' Phin countered patiently. 'They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a 'good book' for someone.' I nodded. I couldn't fault his logic.

a variety of languages

But I understand it better than I can speak it.

I'd felt the ruma had magically understood everything that happened, but now I realize his gifts may have less to do with magic than with interpreting the world around him in a magical way.

But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are.

when we put on clothes, we're telling ourselves something, and we're communicating that something to every person we meet.

It's strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, none will suffice.

To return, then, to the potentially problematic issue of the effortlessness with which we read minds: a flagrantly wrong, from our perspective, interpretation, such as taking tears of grief for tears of joy, or thinking that Mr. Newlin raises his hand to point out that the sky is falling, is still effortless from the point of view of cognitive psychologists because of the ease with which we correlate tears with an emotional state or the raised hand with a certain underlying desire/intention.

We all learn, whether consciously or not, that the default interpretation of behavior reflects a character's state of mind, and every fictional story that we read reinforces our tendency to make that kind of interpretation first.

If a pattern of triangles keeps repeating, then it is a very strong message, and we need to listen to what it is trying to tell us.

If a storyteller worried about the facts - my dear Lucian, how could he ever get at the truth?

One way everything looks all right, the other way, it looks all wrong.

To identify faith with the holding of a certain number of beliefs that come to us from the distant past actually makes a mockery of Christian faith and reduces it to the schoolboy's definition: "Faith is believing things you know ain't true".

The important thing is that another medium—stage, film, music—doesn't obliterate a book. The movie is here now, on a big screen, with stars and costumes and a score. But the book hasn't gone away. It has simply grown up, grown larger, and begun to glisten in a new way.

A lot of people I know would hate that ending, but not me. I loved it. Mainly because I got to make the book happy. I decided they made it. They made it to the past. I decided the past was our world, and the future was their world. It was parallel worlds.

Walter cares more about what a book has to say than he does about whether he can turn it into a stuffed animal or a calendar or a movie.

Artist?" Thomas suggested. "That's a word. I've never heard anyone say it, but I've read it in some of the books. It means, well, someone who is able to make something beautiful. Would that be the word?