Quotes About Meaning

That's not a bad word . . . hate and war are bad words but fuck isn't.

Dingleberry: a small clot of dung, as clinging to the hindquarters of an animal.

For songs are the heart of our memory and they let us live the search for meaning in our lives again and again.

Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankel.

other words, technologies only come to life and have meaning as people adopt and use them.

We've all heard that the unexamined life is not worth living, but consider too that the unlived life is not worth examining.

It's funny how "a part" and "apart" are complete opposites, yet only differ by a little space.

The word 'jihad' has nowhere been used in the Qur'an to mean war in the sense of launching an offensive. It is used rather to mean 'struggle'. the action most consistently called for in the Qur'an is the exercise of patience. (p. 7-8)

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

The clown performs mute rites, as poetry always celebrates some willfully silenced voice.

So when people said that the music or the book or the film was "good" or "bad," I usually felt that I just didn't know what they were talking about.

We write to make sense of it all.

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

This is not a journal", he wrote, "it is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand." (Bruce) -Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pg. 436)

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

What makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.

There it was, word for word,The poem that took the place of a mountain.

Poetry is the subject of the poem.