Quotes About Meaning

I think the damned souls in hell must spend half their time wondering what it was that they really meant to do.

Death is the price we pay for life.

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn't; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle. Maybe they don't want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?

If someone means well, but does ill, the ill is still done—and the consequences still exist. Besides, if intent forgives wrong, then any wrongdoer can claim good intent.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera. Suddenly, if you are working a lot, it takes over and then you see meaning in everything. You don't have to push for it. That's what I mean by the visual life. Very rare."1

The key to a happy life isn't to manipulate the conditions around me so I can feel better, the key is to change the meaning I give it and find happiness, no matter what's going on!

This is a tale of a beauty much deeper than that. It is the story of two people drawn together under the most interesting of circumstances, two people who learn to truly see what matters only after they meet each other and their tale—one both as old as time and as fresh as a rose—begins.

We surrendered rather easily to yet another romantic notion: that meaning is to be found only in misery

You ready?" Evan asks, and he's looking at me, and I love his hair, I love his smile, I lo--"I Love You," I say, and as I watch his smile bloom I finally get how great those three little words are. I finally get what they really mean.

I love you,' I say, and I watch his smile bloom I finally get how great those three little words are. I finally get what they really mean.

The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.

But when I think Oh William!, don't I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! — Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. — But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. — This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Betty was still weeping, but she was smiling more too, and she said, "Oh, it's just a life, Olive." Olive thought about this. She said, "Well, it's your life. It matters.

she'd have been throwing out clamshells, most likely.

We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end. A few weeks later I found out that William did not like watching me floss my teeth.

We all live with people—and places—and things—that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.

What we do matters is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out.

He said slowly, "Bobby Burgess." There was a faint smile to his mouth. "King of the profound.

Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Angry looks angry on the page. Ugly sounds ugly when you say it.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.

Mailer's Negro lived in a realm of Nietzschean nihilism, of Being-for-Itself.

This was why the ancient Athenians had defied the tyranny of Persia against all odds. This was why the early Romans had risked everything to overthrow their kings, so that they could live free or die. And that was why the Florentines had to be ready to die to defend their liberty, Leonardo Bruni concluded—because without liberty, "life [has] no meaning for them.