Quotes About Meaning

I think melancholy is kind of a misunderstood emotion. I don't think it's necessarily an unpleasant or bad emotion.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

We evolved to make sense of this nonlinear and unpredictable world with stories. These stories are often very powerful.

When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.

My life has always somehow been played out in a minor key, unresolved. Art somehow resolves things for me.

We require, as a species, the difference between what is safe and unsafe to define ourselves. Be it in darkness or in light, where we are means nothing without the comparison to the other place - where we are not. And thus it is the difference between them that tells us who and what we are.

You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for.

Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

Probably only an art-worlder like me could assign deeper meaning to something as simple and silly as Tebowing. But, to us, anytime people repeat a stance or a little dance, alone or together, we see that it can mean something. Imagistic and unspoken language is our thing.

Survivorship comes with unspoken pressures, responsibilities and challenges. After all, what is the point of saving a life if the life isn't a meaningful one?

All my plays have these titles that are oddly tricky. I like that something can look like one thing but mean two different things. Language is really unstable in that way.

For many, to live in a universe that may have no purpose, and no creator, is unthinkable.

Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.

I can't know entirely what's at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it's something very serious.

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

The simple tableau is so rich with meaning that whether represented on the mantelpiece or in the mind, it seems suspended, complete unto itself, somewhere in eternity.

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

Any conversation which does not include the context of the journey of the heart is by definition untrue to who we are as human beings.

An unused life is an early death.