Quotes About Meaning

And there it was: setting, conflict, climax, and resolution. As silly as it seemed, it met the requirements of the heart and it matched the facts of reality

misery, though seemingly ridiculous, indicates life itself has the potential of meaning, and therefore pain itself must also have meaning.

I didn't think The Book of Occasional Services included anything like a Ceremony of Discreet Gloating

I guess it's about trust. Trusting what you feel. Trusting the person who inspired those feelings with the weight of them and all they could mean.

Sex, no matter how explosive and emotional, was just sex after all, at least until someone said or did something to make it more than that

Life had taught him to be profoundly suspicious of coincidence, and it had similarly taught him to view any seemingly random conjunction of events or persons as coincidence and thus be suspicious of that, as well.

To serious readers like him and Paola, reading was an activity, not a pastime, and so the presence of another person added nothing to it.

La nube del no saber —respondió el conte, e hizo una pausa—. Siempre me ha parecido un título maravilloso para una autobiografía.

Detach language from meaning, and the world was yours.

In the end, no matter how beautiful or precious, what object had any value in comparison to life?

Brunetti had once come across the term 'compassion fatigue', but thought that the oh-so-clever press had got it wrong, and the term should really be, 'horror fatigue'.

Why was it that the words with which we confronted death always sounded so inadequate, so blatantly false?

isn't the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?

with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there.

Though Julian could be marvelously kind in difficult circumstances of all sorts, I sometimes got the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.

There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

It's not about outward appearances but inward significance.

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS

Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial.

There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.