Quotes About Meaning

And I'm moved, it's so beautiful. Not what I wrote, but to have it given back like this. To have her remember the words and the tune. To hear it in her voice.

It's as if when you love someone, they become your reason. And maybe I've gotten it backward, maybe it's just because I need a reason that I find myself falling in love with her. But I don't think that's it. I think I would have continued along, oblivious, if I hadn't happened to meet her.

Yes, time can be buoyed by wordlessness, but it needs to be anchored in words.

That whole week, we started to divide things into those two categories: anything or something. A piece of jewelry bougth at a department store: anything. A piece of jewelry made by hand: something. A dollar: anything. A sand dollar: something. A gift certificate: anything. An IOU for two hours of starwatching: something. A drunk kiss at a party: anything. A sober kiss alone in a park: something.

I am learning that a life isn't real unless someone else knows its reality. And I want my life to be real.

That's the question, isn't it? you said one night. Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?

yarn, n. Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once. Knit me a sweater out of your best stories. Not the day's petty injustices. Not the glimmer of a seven-eights-forgotten moment from your past. Not something that somebody said to somebody, who then told it to you. No, I want a yarn. It doesn't have to be true.

Like most of Salinger's characters, she wouldn't be such a fuckup, you felt, if these fucked-up things didn't keep happening to her. ... We believe in the wrong things, I wrote, using the same pen Boomer had used on his arm. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong.

I am a firm believer in serendipity - all the random pieces coming together in one wonderful moment, when suddenly you see what their purpose was all along.

How do you commemorate a year? A paper anniversary, but we are the words written down, not the paper.

R: I know that deep down, I mean the world to him. A: Deep down? That sounds like settling to me. You shouldn't have to venture deep down in order to get to love.

No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough

We do not start as dust. We do not end as dust. We make more than dust.

These things do not matter except that they matter to us. We have given them meaning In the same way we have given each other a meaning.

You ask me some questions And I give you some answers But nothing that would make you understand.

I still have that drawing. Whenever I look at it, it makes me happy. That's the moral of the story. That's it.

From behind the wheel, I learn the difference between a eulogy and an elegy, and discover which is more vital, in life and in death.

I realized I would always be missing something. That no matter what I did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed. I had to think about what I wanted, outside the heat of wanting.

Going through the motions gives you plenty of time to examine the motions. I used to find this interesting. Now it has taken on the taint of meaninglessness.

We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something.

Even though the own world doesn't matter to her, she matter to the world

What a powerful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.

If he said anything to me, I would gather the sentences like a shell seeker.

And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed.