Quotes About Interpretation

An anthology of quotations is a museum of utterances.

Unless created as freestanding works, quotations resemble "found" art. They are analogous, say, to a piece of driftwood identified as formally interesting enough to be displayed in an art museum or to a weapon moved from an anthropological to an artistic display.... The presenter of found art, whether material or verbal, has become a sort of artist. He has not made the object, but he has made it as art.

I'm not afraid to call a wine that tastes like Skittles or green peppers mixed with orange marmalade. I'll say, 'It tastes like chicken.' I mean, that's not what people think of when they think of wine, but that's what it tastes like to me and it hits home.

If this is so, then the distinction between scientists, poets, painters, and writers is not clear. In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters, and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. Those people in whom this gift is especially pronounced, we call geniuses.

Nonsense is that which does not fit into the prearranged patterns which we have superimposed on reality...Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.

Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.

What is nonsense, and what is not, then, may be merely a matter of perspective.

Words ... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

We must listen to poets.

Words do not express thoughts very well; every thing immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.

The Scriptwriter is the type of person who asks you a question, answers it himself, then walks away angry at what you said.

Los estados de ánimo anclan los mensajes.

Sometimes, fiction tells a truth that history cannot.

what is truth but a metaphor for the human condition?

Imagination is just what others use to get things they can't understand into their heads. Rarely – if ever – do they actually fit there. -Hermes

Words can be potent magic indeed, but they can also enslave us. We grasp from wyrd tiny puffs of wind and store them in our lungs as words. But we have not thereby captured a piece of reality, to be pored over and examined as if it were a glimpse of

Some people put up a peace sign with one hand. Some people put up the middle finger instead. I use two hands and put up both.

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, narrow, or controlling orthodoxies of so much of Christian history, doesn't take itself too seriously. It is humble. It doesn't claim too much. It admits it walks with a limp.

when theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called "liberation theologians," but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled "domination theologians" or "colonization theologians." Similarly, we have "black theology" and "feminist theology," but Greco-Roman orthodoxy is never called "white theology" or "male theology.

I take sounds and change them into words.

It's nice, I think, when people use your music for things you didn't think of.

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.