Quotes About Meaning

Everything ceased. She listened hard. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But she could feel the calm breathing of the night. She put on her mother's mitts, took the ax, stepped out the door. Outside, there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.

Where are we bound? Is it any different, in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are not an idea worth thinking anymore.

She gave him a look that would've shaved his face if he had whiskers.

Words The word used for ejaculation—baashkizige—is also used for shooting off a gun. The word used for condom—biinda'oojigan—means gun case. Millie entered these words into her notebook. Fascinating.

The world was tender with significance. "Onizhishin, so beautiful," Patrice murmured.

He was poised on circumstance.

Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals.

Went outside to answer Snowy Owl's question, Who? Owl not satisfied with answer.

What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?

Sternly, he nodded up and down when he listened instead of tipping his head to the side. Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?

Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!

C'est peut-être ça qu'on cherche à travers les vie, rien que cela, le plus grand chagrin possible pour devenir soi-même avant de mourir.

Maybe that's what we look for all our lives, the worst possible grief, to make us truly ourselves before we die.

L'amour c'est l'infini mis à la portée des caniches et j'ai ma dignité moi !

Quand on a pas d'imagination, mourir c'est peu de choses, quand on en a, mourir c'est trop.

Personne ne lui résiste au fond à la musique. On n'a rien à faire avec son cÅ"ur, on le donne volontiers. Faut entendre au fond de toutes les musiques l'air sans notes, fait pour nous, l'air de la Mort.

Nous sommes, par nature, si futiles, que seules les distractions peuvent nous empêcher vraiment de mourir.

Just like the splashing waves, the whispering sand, the crying gulls. Everything in nature meant something, alive with private poetry for any person willing to listen.

Jane put her hand on the calendar, as if she could take those days right in through her skin, her pores, into her blood and bones, hold them forever. But time didn't work that way. Time was all about the present. It was where you were and what you were doing, in any given moment, that gave life its meaning.

But her life on this earth had taught her this: that love, in the end, was all that mattered. Friends, families, suitors, husbands: Goodness abounded in all of them.

Si seulement il avait un peu de temps. [...] Le temps aussi de bien comprendre le mot amour. Un mot beaucoup trop gros pour lui. Tellement gros qu'il ne sait pas par quel bout le prendre.

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point.

Language supplies us with ways to express ever subtler levels of meaning, but does that imply language gives meaning, or robs us of it when we are at a loss to name things?

While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backward, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark. . . Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.