Quotes About Meaning

That isn't an expression that means anything to me, really. Make a fool of yourself. How can anybody do that? How can you make a fool? Show the fool, yes, expose the fool, but isn't the fool just yourself, isn't it there all the time? Show yourself. What else can you do?

I have only had one better name than Santa Claus. And it was not Ziggy. It was not Joe Ziggy, it was not Stanley or Livingstone, Brother, Son, Nephew, Friend, or Mr. Johnson. I have loved all those names. My best name is Daddy.

She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.

I missed her then, but it was an odd sort of missing because by then I knew the meaning of forever.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.

And who's to say that just because something lasts only a short time, it has little value?

What if more of life could be like that? Like the last slow dance, where, to echo T.S. Eliot, a lifetime burns in every moment.

It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period

If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God reads letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. (Walker 2000: 110)

I think of the meaning of the word testimony. Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other's testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake.

Yo creo que estamos aquí para cavilar. Para preguntar. Y que preguntándonos por las cosas grandes encontramos respuestas para las pequeñas, casi por casualidad. Pero sobre las grandes te quedas como al principio. Y cuanto más cavilo y me pregunto, más amor siento.

Anyhow, he say, you know how it is. You ast yourself one question, it lead to fifteen. I start to wonder why us need love. Why us suffer. Why us black. Why us men and women. Where do children really come from. It didn't take long to realize I didn't hardly know nothing. And that if you ast yourself why you black or a man or a woman or a bush it don't mean nothing if you don't ast why you here, period.

Qué crees tú? Yo creo que estamos aquí para cavilar. Para preguntar. Y que, preguntándonos por las cosas grandes, encontramos respuesta para las pequeñas, casi por casualidad. Pero sobre las grandes te quedas como al principio. Y cuánto más cavilo y me preguntó, más amor siento.

I am beginning to comprehend the mystery of the gift of suffering. It is true as some have said that it is a crucible in which the gold of one's spirit is rendered and shines.

If you know your heart sorry, I say, that mean it not quite as spoilt as you think.

I have never heard a lady say 'arse,' the emperor said mildly. I haven't been a lady for long, I reminded him. A little demon–made of exhaustion and the emperors smile– pushed me into adding,For five years I've been saying 'arse.' It's hard to stop saying 'arse' after that many years. I suppose I should stop saying 'arse,' since ladies don't say- 'Arse', he finished for me. I met his grin.

Again, she may have made the equation that sexual involvement was inextricably linked with death.

this pestiferous person'.

Sometimes its like Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to be deep.

artificial void

There is no definition of a mental disorder. It's bullshit. I mean, you just can't define it.

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly. God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.