Quotes About Meaning

School-age children become storytellers. Not only do they enjoy hearing stories, they can look back over the events of their lives and weave those events together into a story or narrative and, in the process, discover meaning in those concrete experiences.

We are devoted to and love whatever becomes our center of value and find meaning as we live our lives focused on and guided by that central value. In the Christian faith, the ultimate center of value is to be the Creator, the redeemer God.

Faith includes not only a center of value and an image of power but, thirdly, trust in and loyalty to a story that helps us make sense out of our world and experiences. This is what Fowler calls the shared master story.

As children construct their understandings of God and religion, they are surrounded by symbols for their imaginations to take hold of and to build into their faith images. When children begin to ask questions about the rituals and symbols of the faith, we know their imaginations are grasped by the symbol and that they are working to create a meaning for it.

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

everything has a narrative, really, and if you can't understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you're not really alive at all.

Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.

He quirked an eyebrow briefly, slightly, in such a way that no one afterwards might be able to safely accuse him of having done it. Sei knew the look. Names are meaningless, plosives and breath, but those who liked the slope of her waist often made much of hers, which denoted purity, clarity—as though it had any more in the way of depth than others. They wondered, all of them, if she really was pure, as pure as her name announced her to be, all white banners and hymeneal grace.

We've made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant.

What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren't a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

who am i, really? What does any of it mean? i'm so afraid someday everyone will see that i'm just an imposter, a fake, among all the real and gorgeous godheads. -

Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise … otherwise it's nothing but a funeral.

Is she happy? She doesn't understand. She has never considered it. It is possible to be so entirely happy you never ask the question. She is a full glass submerged in water. Neither nor both full and empty. The inquiry, though kind, has no meaning for her.

Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea.

A ring don't make a bride, that's all.

If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there's no limit on how many things they can mean!

These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

Don't trust metaphors," the wombat snorted. "If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there's no limit on how many things they can mean!

The word is "love," the story tells her, but she says No, that is nonsense. "Love" is a four-letter word, the story says, but Sally says, No, you are missing the point. There is no word, just words, lots and lots of them, a universe of words, galaxies of them

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself" (p. 5)

research project would not exist. It is not our purpose

She talked about how the circuits of a poetic form are not charged on what you say, but what you hold back. The poem is a net that catches the stutters, the hesitations, rather

After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.