Quotes About Meaning

Some words have to be explicitly uttered, Lenore. Only by actually uttering certain words does one really DO what one SAYS. 'Love' is one of those words, performative words. Some words can literally make things real.

Our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.

There's more to life than sitting there interfacing, it might be a newsflash to you.

I think, today's irony ends up saying: How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.

one is that you attain the goal and realize the shocking realization that attaining the goal does not complete or redeem you, does not make everything for your life "OK " as you are, in the culture, educated to assume it will do this, the goal. And then you face this fact that what you had thought would have the meaning does not have the meaning when you get it, and you are impaled by shock.

None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death.

sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?

JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow. JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth? LENORE: I smell trap. JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more? LENORE: I would kill for a shower.

I didn't stand for anything. If I wanted to matter - even just to myself - I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Word inflation . . . Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.

He said he didn't think Lenore should go to the G.O.D. Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that, he said, People don't go to a place like that to look for other people. That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing.

Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes.

It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way.

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.

What if I told you she could because she's had this happen and she totally knows it's possible to be just a thing but just like Victor Frankl that every minute from then on minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something? Then what would you say?

God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship---be it Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles---is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.

Having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward.