Quotes About Meaning

So always avoid banality. That is, avoid illustrating the author's words and remarks. If you want to create a true masterpiece you must always avoid beautiful lies: the truths on the calender under each date you find a proverb or saying such as: He who is good to others will be happy. But this is not true. It is a lie. The spectator, perhaps, is content. The spectator likes easy truths. But we are not there to please or pander to the spectator. We are here to tell the truth.

No one can help me find answers, least of all someone who claims he's found a solution to life.

Their family and friends are the only ones who can understand the depths of their grief, the life's work of creating meaning in loss, of having their world shaped by violence they couldn't see coming and did not deserve.

The movie I was working on, Cleopatra, it's about how destructive a force love can be. But maybe that's what every story is about.

Being alive isn't the same thing as living

My dreams tend to be either so obscure as to seem random, or so obviously connected to my subconscious that it's embarrassing- as if even my hidden depths lack depth.

People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.

Something about the memory caused him to tear up, to think again about the unknowable nature of the people we love.

All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character—what we believe—none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing.

All art is personal. Otherwise, what's the point?

If every event is part of the fabric of the conspiracy, then everything must have a reason, a meaning.

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value

all we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character--what we believe--none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing: it's our goddamned story!

Words and emotions are simple currencies. If we inflate them, they lose their value, just like money. They begin to mean nothing. Use 'beautiful' to describe a sandwich and the word means nothing. Since the war, there is no more room for inflated language. Words and feelings are small now—clear and precise. Humble like dreams.

I realized, as all survivors must, that being alive isn't the same thing as living.

We don't have to know everything. If you believe in fate and some kind of meaning and sense in this fucked-up world, then believe with abandon, love. Enjoy it.

How you find love means nothing. It's what you do with it when you see it that does. And when Julie looked at Matt, she unquestionably saw love.

you're just....You're everything His words are perfect, but the tone in his voice is not right. Wistful. Apologetic.

protesting, but she refused to let go. "Aha!" She squinted at his shirt.

I guess I liked the idea that... well, that there might be some kind of larger meaning to life or whatever. My mother was into that. She had a nonreligious spiritual side to her, if that makes any sense. She believed in the idea of fate and destiny. An interconnectedness and purpose in life.

What does a word mean? And a life? In the end, it seems to me, the same thing. Just as a word can have many dimensions, many nuances, great complexity, so, too, can a person, a life. Language is the mirror, the principal metaphor. Because ultimately the meaning of a word, like that of a person, is boundless, ineffable.

I think that the power of art is the power to wake us up, strike us to our depths, change us. What are we searching for when we read a novel, see a film, listen to a piece of music? We are searching, through a work of art, for something that alters us, that we weren't aware of before. We want to transform ourselves, just as Ovid's masterwork transformed me.

Plato says the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die.