Quotes about Interpretation

No matter what I see or how many times I think I may have seen it before, I always ask, "What is this, Lord?" I am confident that the same God who gives me the revelation can also interpret it for me.

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

When she said to him once It looks as if it was painted! it seemed to Ethan that the art of definition could go no farther, and that words had at last been found to utter his secret souls.

In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women's faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.

Though Harmon Gow developed the tale as far as his mental and moral reach permitted there were perceptible gaps between his facts, and I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

Part of the depressive syndrome is that you are immensely loyal to your interpretation of yourself and your world. If God says you are forgiven in Christ, you create new rules that mandate contrition, penance, and self-loathing. If God says he loves you, you insist it is impossible. There it is: your system is higher than God's.

We crave autonomy. Autonomy is closely linked to arrogance. They are both expressions of human pride, but autonomy suggests that we want to be separate from more than over. We want to establish the rules rather than submit to the lordship of the living God. This was the essence of Adam's original sin. We want to interpret the world according to our system of thought. We want to establish our own parallel universe, separate from God's.

Anger takes everything personally, as if everything is an intentional act to make your life miserable.

The fastest way to bring a wrecking ball to our skewed interpretations is through confession.

In our attempts to help, we can overinterpret suffering.

To deeply understand fear we must also look at ourselves and the way we interpret our situations. Those scary objects can reveal what we cherish. They point out our insatiable quest for control, our sense of aloneness.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.