Quotes About Interpretation

in asking the question, Who was Jesus?, we must expect different answers because only part of the response can come from history. The other part comes from the heart of the person answering the question. The query is both historical and personal, so the answers will be both as well.

The simpler way to say it is that perspective matters.

Even totally random patterns will often appear non-random to us.

human beings commonly imagine patterns (whether good or bad) where really there are none.

this claim makes little sense.

we usually have only vague indicators to rely upon.

But the fact of eight deaths must mean something, right?

She misinterprets this as a question.

The best way to convey meaning is to tell people what the information means to you yourself, he said. And he gave me three words to use to do that. I am worried, I told Douglass.

He ignored the obvious on X rays.

The message, however, was not lost on anyone.

Ronald Dworkin

Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?

It's difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue.

Toni did not speak English and I didn't speak Russian, but I felt as if we were making love that last night through our interpreters. I still don't know if she knew what was going on or not, but I suspect that she did.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

When someone said to me, 'How do you feel?' or 'What do you think?' or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response.

TOLEDO: Everybody got style. Style ain't nothing but keeping the same idea from beginning to end. Everybody got it.

I understand why sometimes people speak in cliches because sometimes there is no other way to describe something.

My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.

Signs with missing letters can only mean bad things.

Books are like that. Books just are. Sometimes books need to be, they need to exist and so they will body-snatch a writer and climb out through the writer's fingers and into the world where they belong to different people to different degrees and for different reasons. I

In spouse, I mostly hear "S.mouse," the name of Chris Lilley's blackface teenage rapper in Angry Boys. And

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.