Quotes About Meaning

Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.

Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.

I know the fucking Bible, and there ain't no fucking Book of Leviathan.

She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his Greenwich Standard ...

To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.

This is all too important." Aenea smiled. "It's all too important. That's the damned problem, isn't it?" She turned her face back to the stars.

I learned that poets aren't God, but if there is a God … or anything approaching a God … he's a poet. And a failed one at that.

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth.

She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things—

the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unselfconscious flow of little things – the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossings and connections casual, dialogues imminently forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.

Father thought that the first stage of human happiness was a 'fellowship with essence

What's it called?" she asked. "La putain enormé," said Ada. "What does it mean?

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.

Henry James hated epilogues and refused to use them in his fiction. He said that life granted us no "epilogues", so why should art or literature?

Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. "Don't you see, James?" he said at last. "You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.

Romantico nel significato peggiore del termine, cioè contrassegnato da ideali melensi o insipidi che soltanto un'adolescente, o una società adolescente, potevano coltivare.

Death, she decides early, is simple. One dies and makes the grass and flowers grow. Everything else is a crock of shit.

Sometimes I think that remembering too much history is like alcohol or heroin—an addiction that seems to give meaning to your life but just wears you down and destroys you in the end.

If there is a god [...] he's a poet. And a failed one at that.

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug." He was droll but incomplete. During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven's Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.

If love is the answer, what was the question?

They're just words. And words alone don't really mean anything. It's what you feel and what you believe when you say them that matter.

Do you know the three great spiritual questions? he asked...Who am I?...Why am I here?...And how shall I live?