Quotes About Meaning

sometimes, if you're sincere about what you have to say, if you want to communicate the full force of human emotions like grief and longing and gratitude, you try writing and then realize that your words are just as transient as you are, that they always fail you when you need them most, and that if they can't serve their purpose and convey meaning perfectly—if they can't reach the unborn and the dead—then they're better off buried or burned.2

So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

Why do men so often filter out the detail when they tell personal stories Do they think it's the way to draw out the universality Women know better. It's detail unique detail which more truly does so providing points of divergence and comparison coincidence and dissonance throwing a slanting light on the idiopathic features of our own lives to bring out long weighty shadows of universal human meaning.

Besides, the normal people here wouldn't see it. That was what "different" meant. It's just another word for lonely.

He had settled down some now, his rage reduced to a simmer, rather than a boil, but Katie did not want to see it provoked again. She rubbed her arms ruefully, conscious of probable bruises tomorrow, and wondered that she wasn't more shaken than she was. In a strange sort of way, she had found Sacha's anger reassuring, but rather than investigate the meaning of that puzzle, she sought to think of something else.

Happiness is not in having being it is in doing.

The meaning of life is the smile of a mother.

What's the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life .

That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature

God, you poets are full of shit. You have no idea what half the words you worship mean.

Narrative is the way to communicate ideas. Philosophy just tastes bad to most people unless you wrap it up in a good story.

What's the point of anyone's search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else's. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.

It's a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I'll put this down on the page but it's not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words.

But don't you think there are larger issues the author is trying to explore?' 'Yes, but they shouldn't be given primacy over or even separated from the experience of the story itself.

Kay Boyle said once that a good story is both an allegory and a slice of life. Most writers are good at one, not the other. But you are doing both so beautifully here.

Perhaps all suicides are happy in the end. Perhaps it is at that moment that one feels the real point of it all, which, after you get yourself born, is to die. It is the one thing each and every one of us is programmed for, directed to, and cannot swerve away from indefinitely.

If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

If love is the answer, could you rephrase the question?

To attribute meaning to an event or to a lifetime of events is an expression of dissatisfaction with things as they are.

Who are we? That is the first question. It is a question almost impossible to answer. But we all agree that the busy self occupied in our daily activities is not quite the real self. We are quite sure we have lost something in the mere pursuit of living.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it, and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

As Walt Whitman says, "I am sufficient as I am." It is sufficient that I live—and am probably going to live for another few decades—and that human life exists. Viewed that way, the problem becomes amazingly simple and admits of no two answers. What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it?

One dies without regret if there is one in the whole world a "bosom friend," or one who "knows his heart.

If you were dead, would you want your body to decompose and be eaten by worms until it laid scattered in a zillion pieces as worm dung? Or would you rather have a purpose, find meaning in death and help the generations that come after you?