Quotes About Meaning

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that prophetic dreams were not much use if their meaning emerged only in hindsight.

We live such tangled, fraught lives, he thought, but in the end we die like all the other animals and we're buried in the ground and after a few years we might as well not have existed. This should have depressed him, but instead it made him feel better. The light turned green and he started driving again.

She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon," she'd begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she'd barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure.

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

An Eskimo shaman said, Life's greatest danger lies in the fact that man's food consists entirely of souls.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

The thousands of wealth have fallen with wonders, said Rabbi Nathan of Nemirov. Do you find this unclear? It certainly sounds like the sort of thing thousands of wealth do. They fall. Does anyone know what the rabbi meant by wonders?

If, as Heraclitus suggests, god, like an oracle, neither declares nor hides, but sets forth by signs, then clearly I had better be scrying the signs.

Makes perfect sense. In a problematic way. But life is problematic, so novels must be too.

this is life. Right here in this room, with you, is life.

Their reasons don't mean anything unless I have a choice

If I had loved her... would that be art?

One man's act of absurdity may be another's substitute for solace.

Stephen watched the packets of lives with their memories and loves go spinning and vomiting into the ground. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

author and ethicist Austin Dacey describes as a "shared public meaning" of the war. Shared public meaning gives soldiers a context for their losses and their sacrifice that is acknowledged by most of the society. That helps keep at bay the sense of futility and rage that can develop among soldiers during a war that doesn't seem to end. Such

She sits there for some time, poring over it repeatedly, and you're intrigued to imagine what it might contain, and particularly long to know the words that cause a momentary smile -- but since she's seated at some distance from you, all you can do is guess at the meaning of the parts where the ink is blackest.

There's a reason every book, even one that isn't very serious, is shaped like a suitcase

Let's assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kind of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?

Sales were lukewarm. Back home there was no freedom, but there were readers. Here there was freedom enough, but readers were missing.