Quotes About Meaning

Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.

infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility.

religion ceases to be religion when its poetic authority is recast as civic authority.

people like stories because they are good, not because they are true.

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning.

We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions...this especially applies to what we used to call bad things...the challenge is to find the silver lining in every event, no matter how negative.

Dreams come to tell us something about our lives that we are missing.

I don't think that anything happens by coincidence... No one is here by accident... Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason"...

Once you learn what life is about, there is no way to erase that knowledge. If you try to do something else with your life, you will always sense that you are missing something

Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.

A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.

In creating a "hold upon nearness" the poetic word creates a place where we can stand for a while, allowing us to bear witness to our own being.

That's what I think more and more. There's nothing. No God, no Devil, nothing. No damnation, no redemption. There's just us and what we do. The things we achieve or the mess we make.

Es ist noch kein Buch

the world is full of ghosts .... And the longer you live, the more haunted you become.... the ghosts are there to remind us that we still live, that we still have hearts that beat, flesh that burns, lungs that gasp for air.... Never forget that ..... or those deaths have no meaning.

ICHTHYS, was an acronym for Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter, or Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Savior.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.

Bright Segment" -that's it. If in our lives we have one or two of those, one or two bright segments, Doc thought, we're fortunate. Most don't. And the rest wasn't silence, like that opera, I Pagliacci, said. The rest was just noise.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand,But they are not the Life for which they stand.