Interpretive Lens Quotes

The Bible itself is a book that constantly must be wrestled with and re-interpreted. ... Bible interpretation is colored by historical context, the reader's bias and current realities. The more you study the Bible, the more questions it raises. It is not possible to simply do what the Bible says.

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.

Sometimes you read a passage by a great writer, and you know what he says and how he says it will always be, for you, the only possible way it could be. Less often a painter will describe an event in a way that fits into your interpretation of that event so perfectly that it becomes the event itself.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Reality is ultimately a selective act of perception and interpretation. A shift in our perception and interpretation enables us to break old habits and awaken new possibilities for balance, healing, and transformation.

I really believe we read differently when we know even the most banal facts of an author's life.

All experience is subjective.

I do think people need to recognize that a lot of journalists want to write a story a certain way because the story will be better or the portrayal will be better, or at least recognize that whenever you're looking at something, you're seeing it through somebody's eyes who may actually not be the person who is the most insightful.

Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see.

The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.

Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.

I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.

Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides.

I don't think there is ever objective biography. Our vision of our subject is always shaped by who we are. So I do, of course, think the biographer's view is always something to keep in mind.

What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance.

The thing represented had to pass through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream - the two, of course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.

My writing is not just all facts and voices. I strive to create a text that works as a sign, pointing out undercurrents that lie beneath the facts.

The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."