Quotes About Interpretation

You talk to me as if from a distance And I reply with impressions chosen from another time.

Stop thinking about art works as objects and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. What makes a work of art good for you is not something that s already inside it but something that happens inside you.

Talking about one's stories is a little too much like nailing a dog to the floor -- you can get it to stay put that way but it doesn't do much for the dog.

But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.

They tried to tell us that what happened to them would happen to us, too, but we could not hear the message. Mistook it for nostalgia, when they were speaking prophecy.

Our memories of an event are influenced by how we want a situation to be

However, memories—unlike reality—aren't fixed. With every recollection, we reshape what we saw. Our memories of an event are influenced by how we want a situation to be, how we perceive our role in it, what people tell us, and even by what we hear or read about what took place. After a while, our brains can't distinguish between reality and our reconstruction of reality.

A-that it is not the literal past, the 'facts ' of history, that shape us, but images of that past embodied in language. B-we must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise.

I paint the spirit and soul of what I see.

Every story is informed by a worldview.

According to the Evangelical Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura, that the Bible alone is the final authority of doctrine, not tradition, believers are obligated to first find out what the Bible text says and then adjust their theology to be in line with Scripture, not the other way around. All too often we find individuals ignoring or redefining a Biblical text because it does not fit their preconceived notion of what the Bible should say, rather than what it actually says.

Do we then speculate that when Jesus said that "they were eating and drinking" that he meant the giants were eating humans and drinking their blood? (1 Enoch 7:2-5).

Text without context is pretext.

If we want to understand how the ancient Jews understood the terms they used, we should look at how they themselves interpreted the texts. If one uses only Scripture to interpret Scripture without its cultural context, then one is not actually using Scripture to interpret Scripture, but conforming Scripture to one's own cultural bias and preconceived ideas.

the toledoth or genealogy, 'These are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Sons were born to them after the flood. The sons of Ham were Cush, Egypt, Put, and Canaan.' Now by careful exegesis of the tablet text, I noticed that there was an unusual repetitive reference to 'Ham, the father of Canaan.' Hermeneutics, or the art of textual interpretation, would tell us that such repetition points toward an unusual identity of the object.

Sometimes a piece of literature is intended to be factual or historical, sometimes poetic or figurative, oftentimes both. So it is the literary context that determines how a scripture should be understood, not our expectations that we bring to the text. Since the Bible is literature with different genres and styles of writing, we should be literary in our interpretation, not literal.

Language embodies a worldview that does not often translate through the words.

It turns out that the commonly used standard we cited above of interpreting the Bible through our plain sense, common sense, ordinary and usual meaning is an act of cultural prejudice. Our Western plain sense literalism is simply not the priority in a very symbolic genre of a different culture with a different plain sense than ours, different colloquialisms and memes than ours, and a different sense of what is ordinary and usual.

When the plain sense of prophecy makes sense, beware your own bias and seek the genre sense. Take every word at its primary, extraordinary, symbolic meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and historical facts, indicate clearly otherwise.

Katherine is a lawyer, as I said, and she doesn't lie; the truth, however, after it passes through her lips can be unrecognizable.

They were common law wed, no preachers involved. You can guess how that set with the more churchy types. Which was probably most of them. Still is. They pick and choose what suits them. 'A man shall not lay with another man,' they're good about latching on to parts like that. But 'Judge not, lest ye be judged,' that goes in one ear and out the other.

One viewer - a Mr. Dionne from California... fired off an angry, rambling letter, complaining haughtily that "the most disciplined attention I could give [The Cube] was a belch from the grave of Marcus Aurelius, occasioned, I might add, by the dead weight of its own dust caving in on itself." Two weeks later came Jim's one-sentence response: Dear Mr. Dionne: What the fuck are you talking about? Yours truly, JIM HENSON

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

Great creations use something we understand to give us something we've never experienced.