Quotes About Meaning

If she wanted to write Christian fiction, how was she to go about it? I told her that if she is truly and deeply a Christian, what she writes is going to be Christian, whether she mentions Jesus or not. And if she is not, in the most profound sense, Christian, then what she writes is not going to be Christian, no matter how many times she invokes the name of the Lord.

How did all this happen? Isn't it wonderful? I feel as though I were just being born! I'm not alone anymore! Do you realize what that means to me?

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything.... It is not that 'God' is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God.

Time is inextricably tangled up with place, and can be measured only against place. Time has meaning only in relation to its position in space, the movement of a planet about a sun, of a night through stars.

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

Not so much of dying, if—I'm afraid of annihilation. Of not being.

Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos we see despite all the chaos.

When I think of the incredible, incomprehensible sweep of creation above me, I have the strange reaction of feeling fully alive. Rather than feeling lost and unimportant and meaningless, set against galaxies which go beyond the reach of the furthest telescopes, I feel that my life has meaning. Perhaps I should feel insignificant, but instead I feel a soaring in my heart that the God who could create all this—and out of nothing—can still count the hairs of my head.

I love anything that is going to make language richer and stronger. But when words are used in a way that is going to weaken language, it has nothing to do with the beautiful way that they can wriggle and wiggle and develop and enrich our speech, but instead it is impoverishing, diminishing. If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free—though we may buy more of the product.

We write, we make music, we draw pictures, because we are listening for meaning, feeling for healing. And during the writing of the story or the painting or the composing or singing or playing, we are returned to that open creativity which was ours when we were children. We cannot be mature artists if we have lost the ability to believe which we had as children. An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.

Oh, zug," Zachary grunted. "Not necessarily." The bishop smiled slightly. "Sacred rites become zug, as you so graphically put it, only when they become ends in themselves, or divisive, or self-aggrandizing.

Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.

Instead of rejoicing in this glorious "impossible" which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his mighty actions comprehensible to our finite minds.

The Greeks in their wisdom had four words for our one, love: there was charity, agapé; sexual love, eros; family love, storgé; friendship, philia.

But to serve any discipline of art, be it to chip a David out of an unwieldy piece of marble, to take oils and put a clown on canvas, to write a drama about a young man who kills his father and marries his mother and suffers for these actions, to hear a melody and set the notes down for a string quartet, is to affirm meaning, despite all the ambiguities and tragedies and misunderstanding which surround us.

Ananda," Mrs. Murry said thoughtfully. "That rings some kind of bell." "It's Sanskrit," Charles Wallace said. Meg asked, "Does it mean anything?" "That joy in existence without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.

I understand what you're doing, and I know what it means for me. You're trying to escape. You're trying to discard me. Don't give up something that could be wonderful, just because you're scared.

She described the work as Girl Friday; it was, in fact, Dogsbody, which scanned perfectly, and after all, words mean what you want them to mean. These

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. 239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

But whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

Nothing in my life would mean anything if you weren't here to share it. There'd be no reason to get up in the morning without you to light the sun with your smile.

On the wall was a dress that I embroidered. It said Ich Habe Genug. Which is a Bach Cantata. Which I once thought meant I've had it, I can't take anymore, give me a break. But I was wrong. It means I have enough. And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. But I will go out and buy a hat.

poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.