Quotes About Meaning

You didn't have to write to be a poet, you didn't have to create things to be an artist. Her mother's spiritual Endeavor was itself a kind of art—an art of invisibility.

Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

How many times had he read the word joy without having experienced what it meant?

They had the beauty of the second glance, the beauty that only revealed itself with intimacy.

No wonder, I thought, her little routines meant so much to her. She gave me so many insights into my own life but, too, an insight into the lives of people who wake up alone every morning and find the courage to get out of bed and show their face.

I am relaxed. It's just buried under layers of incredulity and panic. But underneath those I'm very relaxed.

You discovered yourself and what really mattered only after you passed through the lens of the fairy tale, imposed on every human female and male alike, that someone existed out in the forest of the world for you to love and marry.

Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had ben taken from me, stripped off like clothes I'd only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

Eso es muy superficial. - No se puede ser profundo sin superficie.

Chaos didn't know what this meant. He kept feeling like somehow, intending to travel across land, he'd traveled through time instead.

We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. . . . We admit nothing outside of the text.

I'm forever writing around a void—I guess I don't have to explain to you why that is.

You can't be deep without a surface.

Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.

So meaning is made, not just discovered. That is what religion for the most part is: the constant making and remaking of meaning, by the stories we tell, the rituals we perform and the prayers we say. The stories are sacred, the rituals divine commands, and prayer a genuine dialogue with the divine. Religion is an authentic response to a real Presence, but it is also a way of making that presence real by constantly living in response to it. It is truth translated into deed.

Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.

Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are.

I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What's so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What's so great about feeling and dreaming?

If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.

It was the first time I had ever made love. I wondered if he knew that. It felt like crying. I wondered, Why does anyone ever make love?