Quotes About Meaning

Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment.

No more rhymes now I mean it!" "Anybody want a peanut?" "AAHH!

Thy language will not be so trim and gaudy but thy soul and spirit may be as sound yea more upright, than many of those will be found who charm the ears of those that join with them by the music their words make.

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers...annotations, arrows...an oudine of its design...very seriously mislead.

The real subject of On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other. All words are figurative; no blue is ever just blue.

Some may still be impatient to die for the emperor, but the chief point in life is to die of something and never for something if it can be helped.

For those who chose to build off modernism, fiction became a field for radical explorations in narrative form and voice. Writers set out in search of new techniques that could serve as sources of discovery and offer unique opportunities for amplifying the potential meaning of their subject matter.

Because if we were each as identical as twins, I would scratch your face to say the scratch set you apart and made you more interesting, and gave you a purpose in life: to scratch me back a thousand times.

Works of art are meant to be lived with and loved, and if we try to understand them, we should try to understand them as we try to understand anyone—in order to know them better, not in order to know something else.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us.

If we had the true and complete history of one man - which would be the history of his head - we would sign the warrants and end ourselves forever, not because of the wickedness we would find within that man, no, but because of the meagerness of feeling, the miniaturization of meaning, the pettiness of ambition, the vulgarities, the vanities, the diminution of intelligence, the endless trivia we'd encounter, the ever present dust.

We shall live for no reason. Then die and be done with it. What a recognition! What shall save us? Only the knowledge that we have lived without illusion, not excluding the illusion that something will save us. —William H. Gass, "Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books" (2006)

If a person names as his three favorites of my books Stranger, Harsh Mistress, and Starship Troopers Ã¢â'¬Â¦ then I believe that he has grokked what I meant. But if he likes one—but not the other two—I am certain that he has misunderstood me, he has picked out points—and misunderstood what he picked. If he picks 2 of 3, then there is hope, 1 of 3—no hope. All three books are on one subject: Freedom and Self-Responsibility.28 And

Jesus didn't die as a frustrated failed revolutionary. His death was the revolution.

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.

Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.

His sayings are generally like women's letters; all the pith is in the postscript.

The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

Rorschach did not seek death; he didn't commit suicide by Manhattan. But he understood what the others did not. "It is better to sacrifice life than to forfeit morality. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that, so long as we live, we do so honourably."18

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

The word violence comes from roots that mean "the undue use of force." Thought that imposes or defends is violent.