Quotes About Meaning

Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.

But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty

a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don't serve the god of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, pervers work and gets paid - even paid well - for it.

attempts to nail down "who we really are" most often serve as rhetorical pawns in unwinnable arguments fueled by competing agendas

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

The joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing. But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't know. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

I'm not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?

I insisted that words did more than nominate.

the history of psychology does not exactly fill me with faith in its teleological progress. p. 204

If a color could deliver hope, does it follow that it could also bring despair?

I am writing all this down in blue ink, so as to remember that all words, not just some, are written in water.

I never aimed to give you a talisman, an empty vessel to flood with whatever longing, dread, or sorrow happened to be the day's mood. I wrote it because I had something to say to you.

10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.

I can go for days without thinking about it; at other times it feels like a defining moment. It means nothing. It means everything.

If you want me to sing this Christmas song with the feeling and the meaning, you better see if you can locate that check.

Words are the map not the territory, they are the finger pointing towards the moon not the moon itself.

Atrocity cannot be its own explanation. Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable it needs to be historicized.

Yet in Germany no less than the United States, the political meaning of genocide has never been widely understood. Both populations have, for the most part, denounced genocide as a racist act, but neither has recognized that it was also a productive one, whose outcome is the nation-states in which they live.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.