Quotes About Meaning

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.

If a story is not about the hearer he [or she] will not listen . . . A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting--only the deeply personal and familiar.

There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.

The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.

You see, there's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.

Names are a great mystery. I've never known whether the name is molded by the child or the child changed to fit the name. But you can be sure of this- whenever a human has a nickname it is a proof that the name given him was wrong.

S-l-o-w-ness--it gave meaning to everything. It made everything royal.

It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.

He wanted to say something beautiful, I think.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

There's no thing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of a postage stamp.

Casy said solemnly, This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter...

This time last year I would have run to Sam Hamilton to talk. Maybe both of us have got a piece of him, said Lee. Maybe that's what immortality is.

Aron said slowly. "I wouldn't want to know that. I'd like to know why you do it. You're always at something. I just wonder why you do it. I wonder what's it good for." A pain pierced Cal's heart. His planning suddenly seemed mean and dirty to him. He knew that his brother had found him out. And he felt a longing for Aron to love him. He felt lost and hungry and he didn't know what to do.

I like it better that way," Lee said. "If they pretended sorrow they'd be liars. It doesn't mean anything to them. Maybe they'll think of me sometimes—privately. I don't want them to be sad. I hope I'm not so small-souled as to take satisfaction in being missed.

His whispered word seemed to hang in the air: "Timshel!" His eyes closed and he slept.

I was afraid I had you in me. No, I haven't. I'm my own. I don't have to be you. I just know. It just came to me whole. If I'm mean, it's my own mean.

The thing that give me the mos' trouble was, it didn't make no sense. You don't look for no sense when lightnin' kill a cow, or it comes up a lood. That's jus' the way things is. But when a bunch of men take an' lock you up four years, it ought to have some meaning. Men is supposed to think things out. Here they put me in an' keep me an' feed me four years. That ought to either make me so I won't do her again or else punish me so I'll be afraid to do her again

Look, Samuel, I mean to make a garden of my land. Remember my name is Adam. So far I've had no Eden, let alone been driven out." "It's the best reason I ever heard for making a garden," Samuel exclaimed. He chuckled.

Words pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator.

There can't be any world without Samuel. How could we think about anything without knowing what he thought about it? What would the spring be like, or Christmas, or rain? There couldn't be a Christmas.

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.

Pilon complained, It is not a good story. There are too many meanings and too many lessons in it. Some of those lessons are opposite. There is not a story to take into your head. It proves nothing. I like it, said Pablo. I like it because it hasn't any meaning you can see, and still it does seem to mean something, I can't tell what.