Quotes About Meaning

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

'Madea' is a Southern term. It's short for 'mother dear.' So there are a lot of Madeas out there.

It's extremely difficult to say what one actually means by 'sculpture' other than, in a provisional sense, it's something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.

Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

See, my strumpf is in my hair. Now, I don't know what strumpf means. It's just a term some brothas gave me.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

The definition of 'safe' is not strictly an engineering term; it's a societal term. Does it mean absolutely no loss of life? Does it mean absolutely no contamination with radiation? What exactly does 'safe' mean?

I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice - their humor, their fatalism, their... well, that over-used term 'magical realism.' It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much, we don't know what it means anymore.

Some of the newer folks in the industry, I'm not sure they are familiar with the term acting. They don't understand what it means to play a character rather than just be a personality.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

When you talk about a 'broad-based business tax,' that's a pretty broad term. I don't know what that means. But it's not something I would be supportive of.

Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.

It isn't true, in any conventional meaning of the term, that the United States or its NATO partners 'invaded' Afghanistan.

I have become a prisoner of the peace movement. But you can't say that the termination is coming and then say that you are going back to your own garden to dig.

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.

We are concerned with the relationship between art and life. Contemporary art is only intelligible in terms of its relationship to our life.

Sympathetic cracks. A term frequently used by architects and surveyors in terms of ageing houses. I know what they mean.

The whole of science, and one is tempted to think the whole of the life of any thinking man, is trying to come to terms with the relationship between yourself and the natural world. Why are you here, and how do you fit in, and what's it all about.

Freedom possesses many meanings. It speaks not merely in terms of political and religious liberty but also in terms of economic and social progress.

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.

The idea of 'advice,' in terms of telling people advice or asking people for advice, has become not comprehensible to me, to a certain degree, due to feeling, like, for something to be accurately defined as 'good' or 'bad,' I would want to know the context, goal, perspective for it.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

I ask myself what is a dictator? I don't understand. It is some kind of terrible person, a bad person. But I am not frightening. I am not a bad person at all.

At first I felt terrible, then I realized... that no matter what I do the rest of my life... I'll never do anything as distinguished as getting on Nixon's enemy list.