Quotes About Interpretation

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

With poetry, you take the stock and boil it down to where it's a glaze. It is the elixir of language.

There's more than one way to tell each other things, and there's more than one way to listen, too.

Okay, he says. They both say it, all the time. I've finally started to figure out what it means. It means "yes" and "all right". It also means less than all right, and a begrudging no. It means everything, and nothing, all at once.

When I looked at life through the camera, I felt like I could finally see it.

When she said that last part, she raised her eyebrows, or at least, I thought that's what she was trying to do. The Botox made it so all she could do was widen her eyes until they bulged.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. What's true to one man, a wonder and a marvel, might not seem so to another, as God didn't intend it for him.

I'm always intrigued by the different ways people decide what to believe. I mean, look at this -- they're taken from all over the place. Celtic knots, Eastern philosophy, the New Age. Past and present collapsed into a buffet of equivalent options all in pursuit of the divine.

The right words don't come... the right words usually don't for me. I mostly experience the world in images. I wish I could show the film I'd taken of this girl in my mind.

if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

Faith involves a certain subjectivity, ... a subjectivity which has meaning only as it is bound to the gospel.

We must warn against an incorrect conception of theology, a conception which considers it possible to discuss Holy Scripture apart from a personal relationship of belief in it, as though that alone would constitute true 'objectivity'.

Myth is that which "diminishes the truth of salvation

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.

The man who sees consistency in things is a wit; the man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist.

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

The perspective of Thomas' confession - 'My Lord and God' - must prevail through all our thinking and all our reinterpretations ... All reinterpretation should be tested by whether it can participate in this confession.

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.

The beauty of a mathematical theorem depends a great deal on its seriousness, as even in poetry the beauty of a line may depend to some extent on the significance of the ideas which it contains.