Quotes About Interpretation

As painful as it is, pain cannot be communicated except by approximation, which means that any description of pain requires imagination.

This is one of the reasons why I remain a devoted student of the Bible: because what it says is so often not what I have been taught it says, or what I think it says, or what I want it to say.

The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom.

one of the worst things about electronic communication. Lacking facial expression, tone of voice, or context, words could be taken any number of ways. With only one cryptic word now, I was discouraged.

What's the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? There are skid marks in front of the dog.

To the pure, all things are pure," Antryg remarked, in Magister Magus' best soothsayer voice, "and to the unimaginative, all things are devilish.

Be drawn to the visual arts for it can expand your imagination.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.

For a minute, I thought maybe Howard was embarrassed by all that stuff I'd

After having read the manuscript, you may well want to know more about the author's intentions before you make blind assumptions in your editorial letter.

They come about through confusing the two kinds of truth telling: the declaration of opinion and principle and the recounting of history.

Evil was a stupid word. It had the same sort of sense, largely meaningless, amorphous, diffuse, wooly, as applied to "love." Everyone had a vague idea of what it meant but none could precisely have defined it. It seemed, in a way, to imply something supernatural.

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

Every incident in the Old Testament was considered to pre-figure in allegory what was to come in the New.

is more unfair," as an English historian has well said, "than to judge men of the past by the ideas of the present. Whatever may be said of morality, political wisdom is certainly ambulatory.

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the opposite or a different version.

The historian who puts his system first can hardly escape the heresy of preferring the facts which suit his system best.

was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel.

When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.

In vain is it argued that we are to give up our private judgment to a revelation; we can only admit the authority of the revelation by an act of our individual judgment.

I think a great book--leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on--is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths.