W.D. Frank Quotes

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

Elie [Wiesel], when you ask, "Why do I want to know," I'm trying to grab the holy. And I'm getting thrown back.

I sense that what you two [Elie Wiesel and Frank Moore Cross] share is that you each have a public relationship to the Biblical text and a somewhat private relationship to the Biblical text.

Frank [Moore Cross], publicly dissects the text but he has a private, passionate relationship to the text that he doesn't often speak of publicly.

The text says Deuteronomy was lost, but you say it was written then.

I try to look at the texts and say: Is there a way that I can find history in the texts and separate it from what may be the mythological elements, and I don't find any rules for that.

I guess what this is reflecting is my own search for answers that I can't find. Frank [Moore Cross] and I have examined a lot of archaeological materials in the hope of finding out.

If I ever write a book on "How True Is the Bible?" I'll have to start out by saying that archaeology is not the way to find out; that it has very little to say.

I would not speak of Judaism as a Talmudic or Rabbinic religion. It's a Biblical religion.

The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.

It has been said that in order to pursue the history of Biblical interpretation, you must include the whole philosophy of the West, which informs it at every stage.

I have a concordance to the Talmud at home, which I have to use.

I grew up in a household in which the Bible played very little role.

My father was a Social Gospel, far-left liberal, and to some degree a mystic. But we did not have Bible readings; we had prayers.

My father's religious life was not Biblically centered. He was a saintly man, whom I could never emulate, so I went into scholarship rather than into the kind of pastoral activity that he pursued.

I became intimately acquainted with the Bible only as a theological student.

Happily, I come out of a Calvinist tradition in which the Hebrew Bible carries as much authority as the New Testament. No different weight is given to one or the other.

The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition.

I find myself a little uncomfortable in the New Testament environment. And this is also true of what I would call late Judaism, the Judaism of the Second Temple and later.

You have miracles [in the Hebrew Bible], yes, but they're not the work, normally, of demons.

[The story of Adam and Eve] it's poetry. One must interpret it as poetry. The first 11 chapters of Genesis [the Primeval History] are absolutely remarkable.

The Hebrew Bible defines Judaism. It's certainly true that the Talmudic interpretations become authoritative and normative, but they are interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. So that is always there.

What is public for you, Elie [Wiesel], is private for Frank [Moore Cross], and the reverse.

I'm excited to have the opportunity to lead one of the true e-commerce innovators.

...we still feel that color is hard on the eyes for so long a picture.

Figure a man's only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.

The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.

Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.

and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.

See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions

Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

But it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it.

My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.

If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead.

oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won't know the difference and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy

I'm not a centerfold.

It's just really about trying to do whatever it is I do at a level of excellence. That's really all I'm trying to do while I'm here.

Of course awards matter.

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know.