Allegorical Interpretation Quotes

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned.

And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

Modern critics, who refuse to let a plain thing alone, have now started a theory that Cervantes's work is a vast piece of "symbolism." If so, Cervantes didn't know it himself and nobody thought of it for three hundred years. He meant it as a satire upon the silly romances of chivalry.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

If you look only as Genesis as an allegory, you have a major problem, because if it's an allegory, then tell me who our ancestor was? If Abraham was real, then from Abraham if Adam isn't real, if it's just an allegory, it's just a story, then what's the real Adam who really fell in a garden and really sinned? Where did we come from?

The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors. All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?" They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.

The Bible looks like it started out as a game of Mad Libs.

In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

What man of sense will agree with the statement that the first, second and third days, in which the evening and morning were named, were without sun, moon and stars? What man is found such an idiot as to suppose that God planted trees in Paradise, in Eden, Like a Husbandman?

Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful.

Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic, to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a simplistic litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings?

Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying, 'This is fiction.'

This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

I declare and I challenge all mankind to contradict my declaration, that no man can give any account of the order of Freemasonry, of its origin, of its history, of its object, nor any explanation of its mysteries and symbols, which does not leave the mind in total uncertainty on all these points. Every man is entitled therefore, to give any explanation of the symbols and a system of the doctrine that he can render palatable.

Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story's just a story

Poe was a student of many things, and among those things he read and referred to in his work was the Bible.

In Judaism, the temple was the most holy site in the world. But if you extend that argument as a metaphor, and you say 'The world is a holy place,' and you're treating this holy place like a money-lending psycho, then Jesus says, 'This is hypocrisy!' and he'd point it out and flip it over.