Quotes About Interpretation

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

The image we produce is the self evident one of revelation..that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history

I do believe in the mysteries of things, about myself and the things I see. I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own incorrect conclusions.

You said this was going to be funny, Jim," Waits barked. "Maybe you better just circle the jokes 'cause I don't see 'em.

Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.

Prepping people to believe something was the hard part. Once the framework was established, they became eager to fill in the details themselves, and could be counted on to do so even if those details made little sense. Remar

In the picture, Ava Gardner's tousled black hair obscured her right eye, and her full, closed lips were pulled slightly to the right, resulting in something less than a smile. They looked as if they'd been smeared shut with red paint, though the photo was in black and white. It wasn't so much a fuck-me face as a I've-been-there-and-back look, the kind of expression you see only on the most expensive whores.

Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.

He]talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.

eliminate the self'. 'The player needs to be able to forget about himself,' she writes. 'This is when real communication begins. For with the elimination of the self, he is able to reach the very core of the music, and is free to transmit it.

The problem with 'the crown jewel of Chinese literature' [Dream of the Red Chamber] is that it has two thousand pages and an equal number of characters, and the hero is an effeminate ass who should have either been spanked or decapitated, both ends being equally objectionable.

In some ways we should be far better off if we never used words. There are those who think that, in this matter of confusion, learning helps. But it may be the means of making confusion worse confounded.

How do i know that what I see as blue and what you see as blue are the same thing? Answer: We don't. We take it on faith.

Howie swore translated to "I am strong and mighty in the wind," but which Jazz feared actually translated to "Another dumbass white kid with Asian tats. LOL.

I consider it the me-equivalent of the Bible-most likely full of nonsense, but comforting to fantasize about.

But what a man sees still must depend on what he looks for. While I have eyes of my own, I shall not need to borrow yours.

The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever...

What, in the end, can we say about Rabbi Akiva? Throughout this book I have tried to keep in mind the words of the novelist Margaret Atwood in the epigraph: "There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.

In Matthew, Jesus declares, "Whoever is not with me is against me." In Mark, he says,"Whoever is not against us is for us." Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?

All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that's one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.

What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own, without setting the Bible up as a false idol—or an oracle that gives is a direct line of communication with the Almighty?

The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.

Myth is depoliticized speech.