Quotes About Meaning

The Master said, "How could one but comply with what model sayings have to say? But the real value lies in reforming one's ways. How could one but find pleasure in polite language? But the real value lies in drawing out its meaning. What can possibly be done with people who find pleasure in polite language but do not draw out its meaning, or who comply with model sayings but do not reform their ways.

I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. - From an interview on the podcast Starship Sofa, December 2010.

He stepped forward and grasped the staircase's railing, looked up at her earnestly. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? 'He doesn't mean the war,' she thought. 'He's talking about all of it - our lives and history and Shakespear. And the continuum. She smiled down at him. A comedy, my lord.

No, no me gusta el trabajo. perezoso y pensar en las bellas cosas que pueden hacerse. No me gusta el trabajo, a ningún hombre le gusta, pero me gusta lo que hay en el trabajo, la ocasión de encontrarse a sí mismo. La propia realidad, eso que sólo uno conoce y no los demás, que ningún otro hombre pue de conocer. Ellos sólo pueden ver el espectáculo, y nunca pueden decir lo que realmente significa.

It is personal. That's what an education does. It makes the world personal.

He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.

I don't know what sort of world she will live in and I have no fixed opinions concerning how she should live in it. I only know that if she does not come to value what is true above what is useful, it will make little difference whether she lives at all.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place.

Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

I ain't got an original thought in my head. If it ain't got the scent of divinity to it, I ain't interested in it

Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes.

What is it? Nothing. I had a bad dream. What did you dream about? Nothing. Are you okay? No. He put his arms around him and held him. It's okay, he said. I was crying. But you didnt wake up. I'm sorry. I was just so tired. I meant in the dream.

Don't take in no strangers while I'm gone. She sighed deeply. They ain't a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.

Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

The judge watched him. He began to point out various men in the room and to ask if these men were here for a good time or if indeed they knew why they were here at all. Everybody dont have to have a reason to be someplace. That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside because of their indifference.

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything?

At our noblest we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives.

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed.

How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

Things separate from their stories have no meaning.

The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.

She asked the girl what she wanted to be when she grew up and she said dead.