Quotes About Meaning

Por qué es bello el arte? Porque es inútil ¿Por qué es tan fea la vida? Porque en ella todo son fines y propósitos.

Teus olhos de quem não fita Vagueiam, 'stão na distância. Se fosses menos bonita, Isso não tinha importância.

La Decadencia es la pérdida total de la inconsciencia, pues la inconsciencia es el fundamento de la vida. Si el corazón pudiera pensar, se detendría.

Happiness is the certainty that our life is not going in vain.

La vida no es como las medicinas, que todas vienen con su prospecto en el que se explican las contraindicaciones del producto y se detalla la dosis en que debe ser consumido. Nos la dan sin receta, la vida, y sin prospecto. La ética no puede suplir del todo esa deficiencia porque no es más que la crónica de los esfuerzos hechos por los humanos para remediarla.

El sentido de todo, el lugar donde él estará para siempre.

Is it life?' he answered.'I would rather be without it' he said, ' for there is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, [...] It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like red-bars and foreign bacon.

I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.

Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol. Her response was, "If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.

She was a talker, wasn't she? Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel. She would of been a good woman, The Misfit said, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. Some fun! Bobby Lee said. Shut up, Bobby Lee, The Misfit said. It's no real pleasure in life.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us.

There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.

As was usual with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward the center where the meaning was.

The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.

In short, I am amenable to criticism, but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not pretend to do otherwise.

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.

For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.

You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.

I don't have a lot of time. I can give a poem a couple of lines, a short story a paragraph, and a novel a few pages, then if I can stop reading without a sense of loss, I do, and I go on to something else.

Symbols are something [the writer] uses simply as a matter of course. You might say that theses are details that, while having their essential place in the literal level of the story, operate in depth as well as on the surface, increasing the story in every direction … the truer the symbol, the deeper it leads you, the more meaning it opens up