Quotes About Meaning

Our actions are like blank rhymes, to which everyone applies what sense he pleases.

If I lost the ability to speak, what would my life be saying?

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

Most long lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathways of some worm from his cradle to his grave.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.

Friendship is such an elastic word. There never was an age when it stood for so many things in private, and was yet so absolutely non-existent in fact.

Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

Color cannot stand alone.

Standing alone, photographs promise an understanding they cannot deliver. In the company of words, they take on meaning, but they slough off one meaning and take on another with alarming ease.

As for me, I am mean: that means that I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

I am too alone in the world and not alone enough to make every moment holy.

I don't feel that I decided deliberately I'm going to write something and have it stand alone. Somewhere by the end I think it would probably revert to imagery.

I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black?

Our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.

The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part.

When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest: There is nothing to eat, seek it where you will, but of the body of the Lord. The blessed plants and the sea, yield it to the imagination intact.

Se poate întâmpla ca, atunci când nu mai È™tim ce s? facem, s? fi ajuns la adev?rata noastr? munc?, iar când nu mai È™tim pe ce cale s? o lu?m, s? fi început adev?rata noastr? c?l?torie.

For a long time then I seemed to live by the slender thread of faith, spun out from within me. From this single thread I spun strands that joined me to the good things of the world. And then I spun more threads that joined all the strands together, making a life.

There is a sense in which I no longer "go to work." If I live in my place, which is my subject, then I am "at" my work even when I am not working. It is "my" work because I cannot escape it.

There is nothing very instructive, for example, in hearing that "the cow jumped over the moon," but who is not delighted by that poem's exuberant indifference to the possibility of making sense? It is a masterpiece. Even so, I am happy to know that some poems delight and instruct, which is a richer possibility.