Quotes About Meaning

Mayor: How horrible our Christmas will be! Jack Skellington: *No.* [the Mayor switches to his upset face] Jack Skellington: How *jolly*! Mayor: Oh. How *jolly* our Christmas will be

I've got a wonderful, pathetic little life that is precious to me.

I'm not sure what the moral is here...I really just wanted to tell that story.

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy too.

Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh.

Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. (p 38 "Spin")

Well right now,' she said, 'I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

All right,' I said, 'what's the moral?' 'Forget it.' 'No, go ahead.' For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept stretching out until it was almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and gave ma a stare that lasted all day. 'Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like . . . I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

Words, too, have a genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

To this day, while I admire poetic opacity in certain authors and filmmakers, I cannot tolerate it in my own work. You may or may not like something I've written, but I'll do my damnedest to ensure that you know what I wanted to say.)

But maybe it's better to be an outlaw with purpose than a citizen without.

It's the pointless things that give your life meaning. Friendship, Compassion, Art, Love. All of them are pointless. But, they're what keeps life from being meaningless.

There's things that have no finish, Scully, no ending to speak of. There's no justice to it, but that's the God's truth. The only end some things have is the end you give em.

Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was.

The only end some things have is the end you give em.