Quotes About Meaning

I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn't really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline - and me. But of course, he is right. They're anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything.

Sau dac? cel puÈ›in aÈ™ fi evocat amintirea unui reproÈ™, ar fi fost mai bine decât aceast? înmormântare absolut?, aceast? minciun? neomeneasc?, tic?loas?, stuid?, c? trecutul nostru nu ar fi în acelaÈ™i timp prezentul nostru, c? ceea ce am f?cut sau am simÈ›it atunci a fost într-un fel r?u È™i absurd...imatur.

There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.

If there's one thing I've learned in my years on this planet, it's that the happiest and most fulfilled people are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than merely their own self-interest.

Up to now, Mary's own impresa, chosen while she was in France

liberty" and "freedom" here meant merely the dislodgement of the Guises by the English:

that if one of the executioners had not moved them, they would have been cut off.

There is a connection between heaven and earth. Finding that connection gives meaning to everything, including death. Missing it makes everything meaningless, including life.

The most central truth to the creation account is that this world is a place for God's presence.

If I say: "I know that either it is raining or it is not raining," this is a tautology. It is the opposite of a contradiction, in that it is true whatever the circumstances, but it says nothing as it applies to nothing in particular.

So, it is the spirit in which one acts that is vital, and the notion of language games clarifies this.

He had an early formulation of what in the Tractatus he saw more clearly — that we can speak of existence only when we assert the truth of some proposition that is not itself existential.

The present is a text, and the past its interpretation.

A whole world of horror is contained in the process of definition.

Definition implies subordination.

Life is serious but art is fun!

Life, Garp wrote, is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.' (David Copperfield) "But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

don't worry - so what if there is no life after death? There is life after Garp, believe me.

Garp discovered that when you are writing something, everything seems related to everything else.

Behind every journey is a reason

You are my work of art, Wilbur Larch told Homer Wells. Everything else has just been a job. I don't know if you've got a work of art in you, Larch concluded in his letter to Homer, but I know what your job is,and you know what it is, too.

Remember, Duncan asked on the plane, how Walt asked if it was green or brown? Both Garp and Duncan laughed. But it was neither green nor brown, Garp thought. It was me. It was Helen. It was the color of bad weather. It was the size of an automobile.

Meaning Michael Milton; meaning the whole thing.