Quotes About Meaning

When people lose their way and lack a real purpose for living they often fall back on certain forms of escapism as a form of self-soothing...

I pluck every day from my sweater or chair, red hairs...strands of significance, traces of you in my life ...

what is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd?...

I learn about the sacred in the everyday - I look in your face...

is the writer a prophet or priest - does he show the truth or serve the truth?...

art is weaker than life - in the end I have a bag of letters to scrabble into order - rune tiles to cast my fate...

perhaps in actions I'm less of a man - but, oh the words - such lovely words...

language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

The book of the hours - Tres Riche Heures - what did it matter when I had you?...

a writer without authority? Impossible. as Kenneth Burke says, creation implies authority in the sense of originator....

My opinion is it's a scandal." "What are you referring to specifically?" "Everything." "Can you be more specific?" "What's more specific than everything?

We all matter - maybe less then a lot but always more than none.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.

Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

Clothe with life the weak intent, Let me be the thing I meant ...

But it is a sad and fatal mistake to treat those other ways [atonement theories] as though they lay on the same plane with this one foundation way [penal substitutionary theory]; in reality the other "theories" of the atonement lose all their meaning unless they are taken in connection with this blessed "theory".

Life is God's joke on us. It's our mission to figure out the punchline.

The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom.

all history in some ways wishes to say something about its own present time.

thus Jacob's name, which means "the deceiver

This reading of the biblical text has not been imposed on it by the demands of science, but science has prompted a more careful examination of precisely what the text is claiming.

Language itself is a cultural convention, and since the Bible and other ancient documents use language to communicate, they are bound to a culture.

we cannot translate their cosmology to our cosmology, nor should we. If we accept Genesis 1 as ancient cosmology, then we need to interpret it as ancient cosmology rather than translate it into modern cosmology. If we try to turn it into modern cosmology, we are making the text say something that it never said.