Quotes About Meaning

White horses are a symbol of death, as well you know. And is half your fault, I suspect.

Delicious. Delicious irony, that they should come back together at the end of the world. Again. And that the wolf should know all, and the boy knew nothing. As he means…nothing.

If anything meant home and strength and heart and culture more to him than the New York Public Library lions, he couldn't have named it.

Be careful what you name a thing.

The corner of her mouth quirked; it wasn't humour.

It was the most stunning protest I could think of, dying to oppose the Synarche, doing a little damage along the way.

Elizabeth had been eternal. Elizabeth was England. Elizabeth was deathly tired.

Surely her sacrifice, my sacrifice, could not be in vain.

He had never been able to name things himself-he was, after all, in chief a sort of archivist-but as with many archivists, a good irony and a pun delighted him.

There was so much information, and I had so little sense of what any of it meant.

Dust was an Angel. He was by nature a servant, even if his service often meant something more like mastery.

There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if most of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.

Somebody embroidered the doily. Somebody waters the plant, or oils it, maybe. Somebody arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: esso—so—so—so to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all.

You can't derange, or rearrange, your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.) The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

She was in that flagging mood when to go on living seems only to load more unmeaning moments on to your memory.

A living dog's better than a dead lion.

While I stand and regard it, the indifference to myself shown by a work of art in itself is art.

If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

What is it exactly," she asked, "that they mean by freedom? What does it affect? What is it besides an excuse for war?

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

sacrifice and denial are not always one and the same. The word sacrifice means to make sacred. Life is sacred, and sacrifice is returning to life what life has given. A sacrifice might be something offered or relinquished. Something dies and becomes the ground of new life, and both the life and the death are sacred.