Quotes About Meaning

My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.

My spiritual evolution I would describe as journey from literalism to figuratism. I now see all religious texts as pointing to an ineffable truth.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

I did my doctoral dissertation on the lectionary readings that we use at mass and how you have biblical texts that have been taken out of their original Bible context and put together for mass, and now they form a new text. Out of that new text, there is an interplay of new meaning.

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my 'friends.'

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.

Now I know that this energy within me is seeking more than the mate or the profession or the religion - more even than pleasure or power or meaning. It is seeking more of me; or better, it is, thank God, releasing more of me.

To me, the songs that I'm most thankful to have been a part of creating are the songs that are able to adapt and change over the years and that mean different things to you at different periods of time in your life.

'Brave' is one of those words that has been bleached of most of its meaning these days, thanks to far too many appearances in the glaring light of ad slogans and corporate public relations. I never thought about anything as brave anymore; it just seemed like a flabby, glib cliche.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

I love emotional, intense stuff; it's easier to grab onto than just being simple. Being simple and relaxed can be the hardest thing. It can be easier to get your hooks into something big.

The hardest thing writers have to do is figure out for themselves who they are. What should they be writing about? What stories should they be telling? What does writing mean to them? I didn't know the answers to those questions for a long, long time.

The greatest country in the history of the world being attacked. So all of this doesn't mean very much today.

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.

I'm not interested in gothic storytelling or the horrific for its own sake. I'm always interested in it as a way of getting at larger ideas or important meaning. And you don't see that as much as you'd think in the history of horror cinema. A lot of times, it's scariness for scariness' own sake.

I don't know what my favorite film of mine is... But I think the most important film I was in was 'Glory'.

Hope is the most important four-letter word in the language.

The most important thing in arithmetic is not the shapes of the numbers but the reality living in them. This living reality has much more meaning for the spiritual world than what lives in reading and writing.

As an artist, the most important thing and the most special thing is when your intention shines through on the work.

I think that's the one thing we all hope for in this life is we leave something of a legacy, that's meaningful to someone else, when we leave here.

My fights all have great meaning to me because they give me the chance to put myself in a position I probably wouldn't have been in before without all of this. The one thing I won't lack in this business is motivation.

I think art is the only thing that's spiritual in the world. And I refuse to forced to believe in other people's interpretations of God. I don't think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.

The only thing I have never known is true intimacy with a man. I absolutely wanted to discover that before dying.