Quotes About Interpretation

I suddenly thought again: as a writer, you're always hearing things that aren't there.

El silencio es una risa burlona. El silencio roba algo.

Around here, 'tomorrow night' means anywhere from five days to a month. Jesus

piso-lhe o pé, que na verdade é um coto, fazendo-o derrubar a caneca, espalhando os trocados por toda a calçada. Fiz isso de propósito? O que você acha? Ou fiz isso sem querer?

It's not his girlfriend. It's Princess Toadstool. And it's not a gorilla," I stress. "It's Lemmy Koopa of the evil Koopa clan. And baby, as usual, you're missing the point." "Please enlighten me." "The whole point of Super Mario Bros. is that it mirrors life.

when did the victim's worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?

There's a man sitting at the table next to ours whose eyes are closed very tightly. The girl he's sitting with doesn't seem to mind and picks at a salat. When the man finally opens his eyes, I'm relieved for some reason.

It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God to justify just about anything as well.

Sometimes, we become so familiar with the primal sacred story of the Bible that we need some fresh takes on it, telling us the same thing in different ways, or giving us some new vantage points to see what was always there, things we'd missed before.

Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we're unwilling to question.

Because if anything is clear in the aftermath of the Reformation, it has to be this: we human beings can interpret the Bible to say and mean an awful lot of different things. We can very easily confuse "The Bible says" with "I say the Bible says," which we can then equate with "God says.

Can you imagine Jesus saying, "Believe that I am the only way. Why? Because I said so, that's why! And if you don't believe, then you're going straight to hell!" But isn't that how we present him through our slogans?

In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God says.

They uncritically deploy verses like Romans 13:1–2 to squash dissent ("Submit to the governing authorities, for all authority is instituted by God and anyone who opposes authority is standing against what God has established").

We must, therefore, never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God—whether in prose or in poetry. Romano

I so wish people had seen it your way, but I think too many of us have read the story to say it gives European white males carte blanche to play God over creation; so `having dominion' gives them a license to pollute and exploit.

Since many Christians see God as an absolute authoritarian, we shouldn't be surprised when they prefer authoritarian leaders to democratic ones.

As with many tempests in teapots among small, contentious, ideologically charged groups with a sense of millennial mission, it is hard for outsiders with the perspective of time to figure out what they were thinking, and why, and everyone involved can only remember that their side was right, and the other side wrong, with the most uncharitable possible spin put on the whole contretemps.

Writing is a mirror. If someone doesn't like what you write, maybe it's because they don't like what they see in the reflection.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

However, the molasses metaphor has three misleading features that you should be aware of.

There is no reality -- only our own order imposed on everything.

Most histories are written by the winners of conflicts, but those written by the losers—if they survive—are often more interesting.

The symbolism of a belief can survive far longer than the belief itself.