Quotes About Interpretation

This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.

Man be my metaphor.

I like a twist of meaning.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgement, and education -- Sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

Be obscure clearly.

"It's broccoli, dear.""I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

All art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art is "conceptual" that all representations are recognizable by their style.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

It's not objective. It's subjective." Katya hooks her bra behind her back. "It's just what you think, not the truth.

Well, you can laugh. It's kind of a hippopotamus and it's kind of a car. And also, it's kind of a church. The meaning is what the viewer sees in it.

What?" Frankie didn't think it was a word. She thought it was—she thought it was what she'd later call a "neglected positive.

When there's a negative word or expression-immaculate, for example-but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Is there some esoteric meaning behind the titles?

Before we can be confident we are reading the Bible accurately, we need to understand what assumptions and values we project onto the Bible:

Thinking critically about why you assume what you assume can make you sensitive, over time, to the cultural mores you bring to the biblical text.

all questions of interpretation are, in the end, questions about application,

We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a crosscultural experience.

when we project our own cultural mores onto the original audience of the Bible, we may fail to apply the Bible correctly in our own lives.

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.

There is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear.

The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a "copy" of reality.