Quotes About Meaning

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

Character is all that matters in the end. It's a child's creed, of course; just one small step up from the belief that the creator of the universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

Now they need only learn what life wants from humans.

the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

I've been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future

But what did psychological mean anymore, except a process that did not yet have a known neurobiological substrate?

life is trying to say something no one hears.

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY dances by in a five-second flip. Nicholas Hoel thumbs through the stack of a thousand photos, watching for those decades' secret meaning. At twenty-five, he's back for a moment on the farm where he has spent every Christmas of his life. He's lucky to be there, given the cancellations. Snowstorms sweep in from the west, grounding planes all over the country

Els had staked his life on finding that larger thing. Something magnificent and enduring hid under music's exhausted surface. Somewhere behind the familiar staff lay constellations of notes, sequences of pitches that could bring the mind home.

To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only aslightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it. All the drama of the world is gathering underground—massed symphonic choruses that Patricia means to hear before she dies.

But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

I, too, had nothing to say, and I tried to say it as well as I could. What harm could so small a thing as saying nothing do to anyone?

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.