Quotes About Interpretation

Use concrete events to think about large ideas. Use large ideas to think about concrete events.

We cannot achieve immersion without bringing our subjectivity into play.

Art—and it is art you'll be doing—is subjective.

Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art -- although it may possibly be very good journalism?

On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, half finished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side. Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are always being said.

The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.

the important thing to learn is to know what people think, not what they say

A rose may be a rose may be a rose; but not this one. Clearly it stands for something more.

the poetry made her uncomfortable. It was too much like reading spells.

Words were made only for babblers, women, and lawyers. Like Bismarck once said: "Words were given to us to hide our thoughts.

Usually when you listen to some statement, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If it agrees with your opinion you may accept it, but if it does not, you will reject it or you may not even really hear it.

When we say something, our subjective intention or situation is always involved. So there is no perfect word; some distortion is always present in a statement.

I thought it was a little like writing, words freed from the mind, from imagination, free at long last. I did not think this a good recommendation for writing: to compare it to skull stabbing, but perhaps it is a version of that.

Accountability can mean letting people tell their account, their story.

A just culture accepts nobody's account as "true" or "right" and others wrong.

Redemptive-historical interpretation seeks to understand an Old Testament passage first in its own historical-cultural context. Only after we have heard a passage the way Israel heard it can we move on to understand this message in the broad contexts of the whole canon and the whole of redemptive history. It is at this point that the questions concerning Jesus Christ, the center, emerge.

no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,

No one could honestly say that a musical makes sense.

Tracy I swore 37 times in the last month. I said the 'f-word' a couple of times, but it was mostly 'shit's and 'bastard's. Is 'douche bag' a curse Graham I suppose it would depend on the context. Tracy How about John you're a douche bag for kissing Barbara Graham It's a curse. Tracy Oh, well then it's not 37 times it's 71 times.

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there.

But, if gods are all-knowing, why do they rely on imperfect messengers to unpack and "screw up" interpretations of their doctrines across the centuries? If they are all powerful why do they allow predators and thieves to infest the leadership of every major religious denomination on the planet?

I appricated that Nell was talking to me like a grown-up, but I had no idea what she meant. Still, I could see that the words flowed together like water over a riverbed.

Later in my life I would come to understand that history books are the least reliable witnesses