You judge people in the context of their time, not in the context of ours.

It is often said that great works of art are —inexhaustible—— capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of —endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to— wild and perverse misinterpretation.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

Some dreams tell us what we wish to believe. Some dreams tell us what we fear. Some dreams are of what we know though we may not know we know it. The rarest dream is the dream that tells us what we have not known.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

We degrade God too much, ascribing to him our ideas, in vexation at being unable to understand Him.

The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128

I have forgotten my umbrella.

The Scripture is never subjected to one's own interpretations.

Life is a series of events and sensations. Everything else is interpretation. Much is lost in translation and added in assumption / projection