Textual Analysis Quotes

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

Extremists often derive their inspiration from literal interpretations of texts that should rightly be read not as Associated Press reports from the ancient world, but as theological and literary enterprises requiring independent intellectual assessment.

The principle rule of interpreting Scripture is that Scripture interprets Scripture.

There is nothing outside the text

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

The whole history of these books (i.e. the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.

If the Apostles and the writers of the gospels were to enjoy a brief stay on earth and return to the company of men, they would be astonished at how many different analyses and approaches were being used to interpret their books, and how many bizarre constructions had been assembled from the trivial notions of the sophists.

We must allow the Bible to say what is says, not what we think it ought to say.

Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.

I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts.

I can say with a level of confidence that Islam is not a religion of war, only because the majority of Muslims don't subscribe to that perspective, not because there's something inherent in the text that tells me it's a religion of peace.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange believe that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.

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.

Knowing about authors' beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you've got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

There's a difference between knowing what's on the page in a history book and actually feeling that page have curves and valleys.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.