Quotes About Meaning

The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it's true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.

Magical? Non. Magnificent? Don't be absurd. Less bleak than anything else we have seen? Now truly you are speaking French, the ambassador said approvingly.

We can't run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, we find meaning in randomness.

All that Democrat/Republican stuff is bullshit, he said. And as far as liberal versus conservative, well, people are very promiscuous in the way the use those words. They don't really mean anything. Within those two camps there are very wide divisions. And between those two camps, there is a lot more overlap than you think. None of that bullshit really matters. The only thing that matters is values.

Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star.

Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology.

The question is, how long does Mr. Spinny have to live? And what does that tell us?

I don't get this, Hiro says. What is Snow Crash? It's a drug, asshole, the guy says. What do you think?

That merely glimpsing three good wooden boxes on a baggage-wain could lead to such broodings made Daniel wonder that he could get out of bed in the morning. Once, he had feared that old age would bring senility; now, he was certain it would slowly paralyze him by encumbering each tiny thing with all sorts of significations.

some darting about for Earthly advantage, others attending to the faraway deeds of Angels, still others lost in contemplation of what it all means.

If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it.

Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste.

Again, redundant—as are 'flattering parasite' and the others.

preäntepenultimate

Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there's an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxional nature of symbols and meaning.

Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.

He thinks that there has been some routine polite conversation along the way, but there is never any point in actually monitoring that kind of thing.

This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

Se podían haber planteado todo tipo de argumentos filosóficos sobre si ese enfoque era mejor o peor que lo que estaban haciendo en realidad, pero, en el fondo, la filosofía no contaba demasiado.

Entire sections of them simply cannot be translated—the characters are legible and well-known, but when put together they do not say anything that leaves an imprint on the modern mind." "Like instructions for programming a VCR.

I know not what you mean. The weather does not make the day. We make the day, as suits us. This day it suits me to destroy the currency of the Realm. The weather is fine.

Gold is the corpse of value

To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other

and people could only make sense of complicated matters through stories. Likewise