Quotes About Meaning

That's what I love about songwriting - that you can write something about your own experiences and think it's completely specific to you, and then people can take away a completely different meaning for themselves. I really love that. I think you've been successful at writing a song when it has a larger life than yourself.

Theatricality is a concept. It's not a specific language.

You can never predict what the specific shape of your life is going to be, and you won't really know its general shape until, God willing, you're advanced in years and you have the time and opportunity to look back in a coherent way and see what your life was about.

A big part of being an actress specifically is feeling entitled to your artistic opinion, feeling that it means something, and being able to stand by it.

My songs don't deal with locations that specifically, even if there are very specific references to them in there; they're sort of just where stories happen, not the stories themselves.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

I know people like spectacle, but I'm interested in moving people.

It is my intention to present - through the medium of photography - intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.

I'm not going to speculate about legislation that I haven't seen before.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Liberals shouldn't cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what's liberalism about?

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

Always, with speeches, I feel like it's an opportunity to say something.

I've learned that I need to spell out, even in cases seemingly so blatant, that in fact I am not taking this at face value and am being 'sarcastic.'

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

I always loved reading. I always was the spelling bee champion. I always loved words. I always wanted to know what they meant, why you used them, who first said them. I was always interested in that.

It's very important to me that every person takes away their own meaning from a song, and it's why I don't always love spelling out what a song is about for somebody.

Heaven is what we spend our lives trying to find.

One of the things you'll discover... as you listen to your own soul is that you spend a great amount of your life trying to bring meaning to your own life. And, by the way, most people are not going to church, so the place they're actually trying to find meaning in their life is at work.

All of us want to live, and that is absolutely natural. However, we should learn from childhood on to choose our best way to die. If we don't do that, we end up spending our days like a dog, only in search of harbour, food and expressing a blind loyalty to his owner in return. That isn't enough to make our lives have a meaning.

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

I know that I'm just a spirit. I'm just a soul living a human experience. You come here for a purpose. So, once you acknowledge that and acknowledge that God put you here for a reason, I feel like you gotta fulfill that as much as possible.