Quotes About Meaning

The teeth of the smile evidenced a clinical depressive's classic inattention to oral hygiene.

Authors are monkeys who mean

Is it showing off if you hate it?

Ibid. on using the verb to be in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in 'I'll Be There For You,' which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker.

And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race.

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:

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: 100 i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

their faces arranged in the mildly sullen expressions of consumers who have never once questioned their entitlement to satisfaction or meaning.

Ci sono due pesci che nuotano e a un certo punto incontrano un pesce anziano che va nella direzione opposta, fa un cenno di saluto e dice: Salve, ragazzi. Com'è l'acqua? I due pesci giovani nuotano un altro po', poi uno guarda l'altro e fa Che cavolo è l'acqua?».

I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness.

Mettiamo che Nonna mi abbia detto in maniera parecchio convincente che tutto ciò che davvero esiste della mia vita è limitato a quello che se ne può raccontare. Be', credo che non sia esattamente che la vita va raccontata anziché vissuta; è piuttosto che la vita è il suo racconto, e che in me non c'è niente che non sia o raccontato o raccontabile. Ma se è davvero così, allora che differenza c'è, perché vivere?

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

As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine's grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains it it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

She kept . . . using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.

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

The fact that twenty years have gone by and we still do not agree what this novel means, or what exactly it was trying to say, despite saying (seemingly) everything about everything, is yet another perfect analogy for the Internet. Both are too big. Both contain too much. Both welcome you in. Both push you away.

I spent a lot of time as a volunteer in a nursing home in Amherst last summer. I was reading Dante's Divine Comedy to an old man, Mr. Shulman. One day, I asked him where he was from. He said, 'Just east of here, the Rockies.' I said, 'Mr. Shulman, the Rockies are west of here.' He did a voilà with his hands, and then said, 'I move mountains.' That stuck with me. Fiction either moves mountains or it's boring; it moves mountains or it sits on its ass. -Interview with Larry McCaffery (1993)

a "game" that will give everyone the consoling impression of making contact, together, with the ultimate transcendent referent.

This argument is not the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections.