Quotes About Interpretation

There is a fine line between reading a message from the text and reading one into the text.

She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

Sometimes the snake's-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

tacenda Now what? She advanced the paper, and wrote: they mean no good to us She thought about this for a moment, and then directly under it, she added: they mean us no harm either.

the snake's-hands in a story can be the best part.

Mais en réalité, c'est seulement aujourd'hui qu'il le comprend, au moment où il en parle, à savoir que, dans un pays où tout n'est que symbole, on n'a besoin que d'un exemplaire de chaque : un château, un roi, un amoureux, un rival, un enfant, un animal, un poisson, un oiseau, une dent, un Å"il, une coupe, un lit. Tous ne sont que ce qu'ils représentent, et c'est ce qu'ils représentent qui change.

What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or — worse yet — leaving the blanks blank?

A 4'33 összesen 273 másodpercet jelent, amire a fizikus rögtön felkapja a fejét. A -273 Celsius-fok az abszolút nulla hÅ'mérsékletet jelenti. Ez az az energiaszint, ahol megsz?nik minden molekuláris mozgás, ami azt is jelenti, hogy ezt a hÅ'mérsékletet már nem lehet tovább csökkenteni. Cage e m?vével a hang abszolút nullpontját kívánta megmutatni.

I do not recommend ignorance and I am not saying that there is no truth, but I am arguing that the best way to think about truth is to call it the best interpretation that anybody has come up with yet while conceding that no one knows what is coming next. There are lots of competing truths battling with one another for their place in the sun, and the truth is that we have to learn to cope with the conflict. The skies do not open up and drop The Truth into our laps.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

Our historic imagination is at best slightly developed. We generalise and idealise the past egregiously. We set up little toys to stand as symbols for centuries and the complicated lives of countless individuals.

Except in dealing with commonplaces and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of another's experience in order to tell him intelligently of one's own experience.

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total.

Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and immediate facts of gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.

The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds.

The local is the only universal, upon that all art is built.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

An earlier image in which Theoklia and Paul were equally authoritative apostolic figures has been replaced by one in which the male is apostolic and authoritative and the female is blinded and silenced.

All were absolutely equal with each other. But in 1 Timothy, a letter attributed to Paul by later Christians though not actually written by him, women are told to be silent in church and pregnant at home (2:8–15). And a later follower of Paul inserted in 1 Corinthians that it is shameful for women to speak in church, but correct to ask their husbands for explanations at home

Those are first warnings about distinguishing the Pauline Paul from the Lukan Paul by separation and discrimination

The problem is that, slowly but surely across the past two hundred years of scholarly research, we have learned that the gospels are exactly what they openly and honestly claim they are. They are not history, though they contain history. They are not biography, though they contain biography. They are gospel—that is, good news. Good indicates that the news is seen from somebody's point of view—from, for example, the Christian rather than the imperial interpretation.

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

When a metaphor gets big, it is called "tradition"; when it gets bigger, it is called "reality";

That is, by the way, an introductory definition of a parable: a story that never happened but always does—or at least should.