Quotes About Meaning

Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.

But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything.

And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? 'Confound it all.' he cried, 'why say Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and save it?

A whole lifetime was too short to bring out … the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning …

Neste mundo não existe estabilidade. Quem será capaz de exprimir o significado das coisas? Quem pode prever o voo que uma palavra descreve depois de dita? É um balão que plana sobre as árvores. E o esforço de conhecer é sempre inútil. Tudo é experiência e aventura. Constantemente formamos novas combinações de elementos desconhecidos. O que está para vir?

Above all, you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness...

the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said — but what mattered if the meaning were plain?

He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall--there, there, there--her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes, shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully, always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her hollowed hands Shakespeare's words, her meaning.

Y el poema me parece que sólo es tu voz hablando.

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

But suppose Peter said to her, Yes, yes, but your parties—what's the sense of your parties? all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand): They're an offering; which sounded horribly vague. But

He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said.

And for some reason she held the sentence suspended without meaning in her mind's ear, "…quite enough for everybody at present," she repeated. After all the foreign languages she had been hearing, it sounded to her pure English. What a lovely language, she thought, saying over to herself again the common place words…

She didn't know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.

She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, Let me come with you, and he laughed. He meant yes or no - either perhaps. But it was not his meaning - it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupulosity. It scorched her...

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

After all, she may have thought, do words say everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies beyond the reach of words?

It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering—the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.

There was something solemn in it- but love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.

If one didn't feel that politics are an elaborate game got up to keep a pack of men trained for that sport in condition, one might be dismal; one sometimes is dismal; sometimes I try to worry out what some of the phrases we're ruled by mean. I doubt whether most people even do that. Liberty, for instance.

The immense success of our life, is I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.

Qué derecho tenían los Bradshaw a hablar de muerte en su fiesta? Se había matado, sí, pero ¿cómo? El cuerpo de Clarissa siempre lo revivía, en el primer instante, bruscamente, cuando le contaban un accidente; se le inflamaba el vestido, le ardía el cuerpo.