Quotes About Meaning

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.

Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.

What greater violence can be done to the poet's experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? …It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.

It all has to do with it.

Senility is best described in the old tongue, duine le Dia, for in that phrase is a kinder, more understanding view of the condition. Its literal meaning is "a person of God," for only the person's maker can now understand him.

Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.

THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES, only patterns we do not see.

Names did have a power, if they were used in the right way.

Angel and Louis in particular could have catalyzed a coma victim back to consciousness. He knew where Parker and the others were

Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

There's a difference between living and just surviving. Do something you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do. It is really that simple. And that hard.

There is a fine line between reading a message from the text and reading one into the text.

Why, what is it, how can flesh and blood come up with such stuff, how can flesh feel it. My lord life is strange. How is that Meaning comes to be? How? How does life cast it up, shape it, exude it; how does Meaning come to have physical, tangible effects, to be felt with a shock, to cause grief or longing, come to be sought for like food; pure Meaning having nothing to do with the clothes of persons or events in which it is dressed and yet not ever divorceable from some set of such clothes?

She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

We're made of stories now, brother. It's why we never die even if we do.

It's as though," Daily Alice said, "each day is like a step, and every step takes you further away from—well, from when things made more sense. When things were all alive, and made signs to you. And you can no more not take a step farther away than you could not live through a day." "I

Mais en réalité, c'est seulement aujourd'hui qu'il le comprend, au moment où il en parle, à savoir que, dans un pays où tout n'est que symbole, on n'a besoin que d'un exemplaire de chaque : un château, un roi, un amoureux, un rival, un enfant, un animal, un poisson, un oiseau, une dent, un Å"il, une coupe, un lit. Tous ne sont que ce qu'ils représentent, et c'est ce qu'ils représentent qui change.

It is not a question of finding an answer to the night of truth, but of sitting up with one another through the night... of dividing the abyss in half, in a companionship that is its own meaning.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.

I see Christianity's influence as a resplendent mural with many scenes, each depicted in bright, brilliant, and beautiful colors. Without Christianity, there would be an awful lot of grays and only a few scattered and disconnected lines here and there giving any sense of meaning. But Christianity adds so much meaning, hope , and beauty and richness to the picture.

Chanting and invoking are worlds apart. Chanting is done with the mouth; invoking is done with the mind. And because invoking comes from the mind, it is called a door to awareness. Chanting is centered in the mouth and appears as sound. If you cling to appearances while searching for meaning, you won't find a thing.

You're not in this life for things to go well. You're in this life to be your deepest heart in all that goes well and in all that doesn't.