Quotes About Meaning

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

We needed time to figure out what all of this meant, how we were going to come to terms and redefine what our love was called. I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth.

Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.

Some things are not lost but sacrificed.

I love you, I whispered to all, to none. -Love not lightly, I heard him say.

I felt connected to the modest peace offered with the fare, thinking about nothing. Just wisps of things, meaningless things, like remembering my mother once told me that Van Johnson always wore red socks, even in black and white movies.

I feel a real responsibility to the images I get attached to.

One step into a living space and one can sense the centrality of work in a life.

Varför skriver vi? En kör av röster väller fram. För att vi inte bara kan leva.

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves?

Suddenly he looked up and said, "Patti, did art get us?" I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. "I don't know, Robert. I don't know." Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down 'Desolation Row.' I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top soleley because I wished it.

handicapping heaven, searching for patterns, and a portal of probability opening up onto the meaning of life

What's the subject of life - to get rich? All of those fellows out there getting rich could be dancing around the real subject of life.

It's not enough to know what all the words mean," he continued. "A good reader starts to see what an entire book is trying to say. And then a good reader will have something to say in return.

Be true to your subject and you will be far more likely to create something that is timeless.

Our lives don't really belong to us, you see -- they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.

The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.

Writing begins in the body, it is the music of the body, and even if the words have meaning, can sometimes have meaning, the music of the words is where the meanings begin....Writing as a lesser form of dance.