Quotes About Meaning

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes between what a text says (or what an author wants to say, or thinks s/he is saying) and what a text does.

Deconstruction wouldn't make much sense without the structures that are subject to destructuring.

A text always remains in crucial ways 'imperceptible'.

A text is a 'fabric of traces' governed by a logic of the 'nonpresent remainder', by what thus figures the impossibility of pure presence, the impossibility of absolute plenitude of meaning or intention.

Derrida encourages us to be especially wary of the notion of the centre. We cannot get by without a concept of the centre, perhaps, but if one were looking for a single 'central idea' for Derrida's work it might be that of decentring.

Differance brings together the two notions of differing and deferring.

In order to be what it 'is', a text is an essentially vitiated, impure, open, haunted thing, consisting of traces and traces of traces: no text is purely present, nor was there some purely present text in the past.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other... I know I've spent each life before this one searching for you. Not someone like you but you, for your soul and mine must always come together.

Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.

True love is rare, and it's the only thing that gives life real meaning.

My wife, my family, my friends - they've all taught me things about love and what that emotion really means. In a nutshell, loving someone is about giving, not receiving.

True love is rare, and it's the only thing that gives life real meaning.

Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in you mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned.

But spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end. It's a mistake of emphasis.

He understood only then how you could love someone, how you could be proud of someone, simply because the were, simply because they existed.

he never felt that way about Japanese - even though he didn't understand it. The fluid monotonic sound of it alone made it a far more beautiful and spiritual language. English, with its heavy stresses and wobbly intonation, was dirty and repugnant to his ears

There was something it was searching for - some kind of memory of a previous life - a scent, an image. Was it the purple-headed man, or something else?

I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.

Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It's all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, first creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.

My true intent is all for your delight.

There are those who work so they can stop. Stopping is the why of work. There are those who stop so they can work. Working is the why of work.

Cory didn't understand existential answers. Neither does life.