Quotes About Meaning

eroticism. Though I doubt that they ever used this word, they embodied its mystical meaning as a quality of aliveness, a pathway to freedom

It is ironic that some people, like Guy, will minimize the emotional involvement to lessen the offense ("It meant nothing!"), while others, like Charmaine, will highlight the emotional nature of the bond for exactly the same purpose ("Nothing happened!").

As soon as we conform anything to language, we've changed it. Use a word and you've altered the world. The poets know this. It's what they try so hard to avoid.

Happy isn't even a real idea, he said. It's just like love. A reasonably skeptical person doesn't even know what it means.

People love to apply themselves to games, jobs, relationships, politics, to create the illusion of meaning...If I can just heal my shoulder, then I could be a quarterback! If only I could finish this documentary and tell the story of my great-uncle to the world; then I would matter . If I was a movie star, then I would exist . People will light a crack pipe or steal a television just to try and feel that they exist

Walt, examining Chris's record collection, said, "You have four different recordings of Carousel." "It's my favorite thing on earth." "Is that because it says that people die but true love lasts forever?" "I … Maybe. I thought I just liked the music." To Tom, behind Walt's back, she mouthed, "How'd he get so smart?

Looking at ourselves through the eyes of those living in places where human tragedy is still embedded in complex religious and cultural narratives, we get a glimpse of our modern selves as a deeply insecure and fearful people. We are investing our great wealth in researching and treating this disorder because we have rather suddenly lost other belief systems that once gave meaning and context to our suffering.

Despite everything, life is full of beauty and meaning.

When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn't matter what side of the prison fence you're on. . . I've already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. I know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way or another, I already know everything. And yet, I find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment.

Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience.

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

She would like to tell him some strange beautiful thing, if she could speak at all, something to make him speak. Communication would be telling something that is all new, so as to have more of the new told back.

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

And perhaps it didn't matter to them, not always, what they read aloud; it was the breath of life flowing between them, and the words of the moment riding on it that held them in delight.

Like Phoenix, you work all your life to find your way, through all the obstructions and the false appearances and the upsets you may have brought on yourself, to reach a meaning—using inventions of your imagination, perhaps helped out by your dreams and bits of good luck. And finally too, like Phoenix, you have to assume that what you are working in aid of is life, not death. But you would make the trip anyway—wouldn't you?—just on hope. 1974

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

Je préfère la vie à la mort, exister à ne pas exister, car je ne suis pas sûr d'être une fois que je n'existerai plus

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don't mean to imply that I'm any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn't mean anything at all.

Je meurs, vous entendez, je veux dire que je meurs, je n'arrive pas à le dire, je ne fais que de la littérature.

JEAN: Visezi de-a-mpicioarelea! BERENGER: Dar eu stau jos. JEAN: Jos sau în picioare-i tot aia! BERENGER: Eh. nu... totuÅŸi e-o diferen??! JEAN: Nu-i vorba de asta. BERENGER: P?i tu ai spus c?-i totuna de-i jos sau în picioare... JEAN: Nu m-ai înÅ£eles. Atunci cînd visezi e totuna dac? visezi aÅŸezat sau în picioare!... BERENGER: Ei bine, da, visez... ViaÅ£a e vis...