Quotes About Meaning

The term itself—my life—is a desperate overstatement.

why something and not nothing? why music and not noise?

He said, The word for moonlight is moonlight.

Because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond necessity.

Doesn't seem quite real. It's not meaningful. I can't quite imagine myself being 73. That's the age my father was! [Laughter.] How can I be his age? It's weird.

I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.

We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely.

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

What's the point of living if we don't die at the end of it?

Isn't death a blessing? Doesn't it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word identity has reached an end.

Everything is supposed to be something. But it never is. That's the nature of existence.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. Everything enters something else. My days spill into light-years. This is why I can only pretend to be someone. And this is why I felt derived at first, working on these pages. I didn't know if it was me that was writing so much as someone I want to sound like.

The world is full of abandoned meanings.

The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning.

That's great. Tell me about it. I hate my life. I'm at the point where I want to hear about other people's lives. it's like switching from fiction to biography. The beginning of the end.

She means everything literally. Don't kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally.

Is there a fungus that speaks to you? I'm serious. People hear things. They hear God. He meant it. He was serious. He wanted to mean it, to hear anything the man might say, the whole shapeless narrative of his unraveling.

A word is also a picture of a word.

The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic.

What do we have to live for, but each other. What do we have to die for, but our love?

common words of spark and heart.