Quotes About Meaning

Among the worst things about growing old is the loss of those irreplaceable friends who added richness and depth to your life.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Stories have always hunted me down, jumped out at me from the shadows, stalked me and sought me out, grabbed me by the shirtsleeves, and demanded my full attention. I've led a life chock-full of stories, and I know now that you have to be shifty and vigilant and ready to receive their incoming fire. Sometimes it takes the passage of years to reveal their actual meaning or import. They disguise themselves with masks, disfigurements, chimeras, and Trojan horses.

Who else would I take as prisoners of my high sanctity before my life was over?

I realized that words were sometimes nothing more than notes you wrote to your deepest self as you fought to articulate the splendor and the magic and the ineluctable sense of loss that you felt in the swift, disturbing hours.

A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.

I don't know you. Then why did you do that for me? Because you are so full of wonder. After what I-- After-- He gestured, his eyes hidden; deep lines ran down his cheeks like claw marks. That seems very precious to me now. How could I not give you such a small thing?

Explain to me again, he begged, why we are here. She had told him once before; it had been like listening to a vivid, improbable dream.

Is she crazy?" "No," he said simply. "But sometimes her sanity is terrifying.

There was a drop of human blood in her, and in her father . . . it brought both of them visions at times, living dreams of the world beyond the wood. Her father had learned to ignore them, for they meant nothing to him. She, still learning words for her own world, did not make such distinctions: Everything was new, everything spoke to her and had a name; she had not yet learned that something could mean nothing.

What you say, when you say a word. What you think when you say it. What I see and hear when you speak. Words are ancient; visions and echoes cling to them like barnacles on the whale's back. You speak words used in poetry and song since the beginning of the world we know. Here, you will learn to hear and to speak as if you had never listened, never spoken before. Then you will learn the thousand meanings within the word. What you say when you say fire.

I don't understand what has happened. But that is has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of identity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.

This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt . . . to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.

Hay algo más aburrido que la historia del pasado? -dijo Therese sonriendo. -Quizá un futuro sin historia.

Finally, Carol said in a tone of hopelessness, Darling, can I ask you to forgive me? The tone hurt Therese more than the question. I love you, Carol. But do you see what it means?

Kick me out, she thought. What was in or out? How did one kick out an emotion?

Writing is a way of organizing experience and life itself.

What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them.

the sense that everyone was incommunicado with everyone else and living on an entirely wrong plane, so that the meaning, the message, the love, or whatever it was that each life contained, never could find its expression.

Por qué estaba deprimido? —preguntó ella. —No podría explicarlo —frunció las cejas—. No hay unos motivos concretos, excepto que para mí la vida carece de sentido, a menos de que la viva para otra persona. He estado viviendo para usted desde septiembre... aunque no la conocía.

He had illuminated the heartbreaking cruelty of war: When men who fight become nothing, only packages of bones and blood deposited in the earth with no clarion call to memory, those they love are left without a way to make such devastating loss hold meaning.

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

How do you fan the fires of faith in your message? By exploring all phases of your subject, grasping its deeper meanings, and asking yourself how your talk will help the audience to be better people for having listened to you.

Pois a vida é curta demais para ser pequena.