Quotes About Meaning

In the silence, our stage whisper might carry.

And looking at one single label on a jar, he felt himself gone round the calendar to the private day this summer when he had looked at the circling world and found himself at its center. The word on the jar was RELISH. And he was glad that he had decided to live.

The form does not matter. Content is everything.

There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.

How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn't it? "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone!" And why not?

We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.

And the odd think in Dad's voice was the sound truth makes being said.

He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patters, like jargon, making pretty sounds in the air.

She didn't want to know -how- a thing was done, but -why-. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead.

And just holding her hand would be good. Can you understand that? Do you know that holding someone's hand can be `the' thing? Such a thing that your hands move while not moving. You can remember a thing like that, rather than any other thing about a night, all your life. Just holding hands can mean more, I believe it. When everything is repeated, and over, and familiar, it's the first things rather than the last that count.

But what is shape? Only a cup for the blazing soul that God provides us all.

Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived?

Knjige su samo jedna vrsta spremišta za mnogo toga za šta smo strahovali da bismo mogli da zaboravimo. Nema u njima uopšte ni?eg magi?nog. Magija je samo u onome što knjige kazuju, u tome kako zašivaju komade kosmosa u ode?u za nas.

Light the third page from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies

But stop and think. What does the word with truly mean? Wits, intelligence. That's all it means. Knowledge so any man or woman with half a brain and inclination toward learning had his wits about him, ey? And so anyone too smart who didn't watch out, was called a witch.

And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying.

Why live? Life was its own answer.

She didn't want to know how a thing was done, but why.

No quería saber cómo se hacen las cosas sino por qué. Esto puede resultar embarazoso. Uno empieza con los porqués y termina siendo realmente desgraciado. La pobre chica está mejor muerta.

And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn't cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty. How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you?

I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively KNEW was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.

Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we've asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away.

Para qué recordar lo que no me sirve?