Quotes About Meaning

all the things we think are important really aren't, and he had no time to think about the things that really are. His whole life was going by and he had never contemplated the big, simple truths: loneliness and longing, desire and death.

Se dijo que todo lo que a él le parecía importante no lo era realmente y que en todo lo que realmente era importante no tenía tiempo de pensar. La vida pasaba sin reflexionar apenas sobre las cosas sencillas y grandes, la soledad, la nostalgia, el deseo y la muerte.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

He wrote more or less the same way as he dreamed or masturbated: a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust, and wretchedness. And in those days he also had an insatiable curiosity to try to understand why people hurt each other, and themselves, without meaning to at all.

Moreover, what purpose, if any, is served by your stories? Whom do they benefit?

Lo que me rodeaba no me interesaba. Todo lo que me interesaba estaba hecho de palabras.

Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Mam once told me the name Margaret means pearl. She said a pearl's the only jewel that needs no cutting or polishing. Comes perfect from the hand of God Himself. And I ought to be treasuring myself like one.

Tell me things I won't mind forgetting, she said. 'Make it useless stuff or skip it.

The striking part of his communication is what he doesn't say, when saying something would make a difference.

You want to be choosy about what you let into your soul when you are likely not long for this world.

Aren't we all, I thought, somebody's harvest?

The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin litterae, you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means "things made of letters.

Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time.

Free time was the most precious time, when you should be doing what you loved, or at least slowing down enough to remember what made your life worthwhile and happy.

When you are told, It was meant to be, ask, Who meant it? What does it really mean? Is someone trying to make you accept an undesirable situation or one in which you have doubts? When you are told, Shit happens, remember that plenty of other things happen as well, such as generosity, forgiveness, ambiguity, and uncertainty. When you are told, It's simply fate, ask yourself, What is simple about it? What are the alternatives of fate? What is fate's opposite?

Every word, every gesture is now loaded with ambiguity, nothing can be taken at face value. We speak to each other from a safe distance, pretending all the years we soaped each other's backs and pissed in front of each other never happened. We don't use any of the baby talk, code words, or short hand gestures that had been our language of intimacy, the proof that we belonged to each other.

The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The Centrifugal Force of Arguments": The farther you move from the core of the problem, the faster the situation spins out of control.

She said that if I listened to her, later I would know what she knew: where true words came from, always from up high, above everything else. And if I didn't listen to her, she said my ear would bend too easily to other people, all saying words that had no lasting meaning, because they came from the bottom of their hearts, where their own desires lived, a place where I could not belong.

The Doppler Effect of Communication": There is always distortion between what a speaker says and what a listener wants it to mean. "The

you became an expert on silence?' she joked. 'I'm not an expert on anything. but I love language in all forms - sounds and words, facial expressions, hand gestures, body posture and its rhythms, what people mean but don't necessarily say with words. I've always loved words, the power of them.' 'so what's your favorite word?' 'hm, that's an excellent question.' he fell quiet, stroking his beard in thought.

Aparte de un marido e hijos, necesito otra cosa a la que dedicarme. No quiero haber vivido para nada, como la mayoría de las personas. Quiero ser de utilidad y alegría para los que viven a mi alrededor, aún sin conocerme. ¡Quiero seguir viviendo, aun después de muerta!

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.