Quotes About Meaning

The small details of life often hide a great significance.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

We love each other, that's true whatever it means, but we aren't good at it; for some it's a talent, for others only an addiction.

Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill?

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Paper isn't important. It's the words on them that are important.

My audience is God, because who the hell else could understand me?

Had she believed all that? Old Pilar's folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn't quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly, and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.

So that's what art is, for the artist," said Crake. "An empty drainpipe. An amplifier. A stab at getting laid.

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.

Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?

A language is everything you do.

All myths are stories, but not all stories are myths: among stories, myths hold a special place.

It was Crake preserving his dignity, because the alternative would have been losing it.

Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something.

We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies that are important.

I grew sodden with light; my skin on the inside glowed a dull red.

but they mean well, I remind myself. Is that ever a convincing excuse when there's blood on the carpet?

Do you love me, that's all, he said. That's the only thing that matters. It was the language again, I couldn't use it because it wasn't mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

From nowhere, a word appears: Mesozoic. He can see the word, he can hear the word, but he can't reach the word. He can't attach anything to it. This is happening too much lately, this dissolution of meaning, the entries on his cherished wordlists drifting off into space.

I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge.