Quotes About Meaning

not now. He was quiet, and then he said, "You are the only person in this world I want to have sitting here beside me. That isn't what I think, it's what I know. I guess it doesn't explain anything.

I think that to be a good writer, you have to put yourself on the line, you have to think deeply about what is meaningful to you and you have to make a good-faith effort to speak from the integrity of your own deep experience.... People don't think about assessing what is the deepest narrative for them. I think that that's about 99 percent of the subject of literature.... Write from it.

Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when the light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But

Meaningless would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.

Again, all any heart has ever said, and just as the word is said the moment is gone, so there is not even any sort of promise in it.

How oddly holiness situated itself among the things of the world, how endlessly creation wrenched and strained under the burden of its own significance.

There were two further points I felt I should have made in our earlier conversations, one of them being that doctrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief, and the other being that the Greek word sozo , which is usually translated saved, can also mean healed, restored, that sort of thing. So the conventional translation narrows the meaning of the word in a way that can create false expectations.

Lila had no particular notion of what the word 'married' meant, except that there was an endless, pleasant joke between them that excluded everybody else and that all the rest of them were welcome to admire.

That there have been wars I have no doubt. I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.

For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

All that purpose. Always on their way somewhere. You had to admire. Maybe a chirp meant "I exist!" and then "I exist!," as if it could matter.

What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather? They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging. They knew it was morning when the sun came up. What more was there to know? If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress. She had

She said, "meaninglessness would come as a terrible blow to most people. It would be full of significance for them. So it wouldn't be meaningless. That's where I always end up. Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can't get away from it.

When did he first notice that in himself, that little fascination with damage and its consequences? He might alarm her. He might mean to alarm her. Doing damage to this fragile night because it was such an isolated thing, an accident, with a look of meaning about it and no meaning at all.

Sacredness is realized in the act of attention because reality is communicative and the mind is made, grace assisting exquisite effort, to experience its meaning.

People don't talk much now about the Spanish influenza.... People came to church wearing masks, if they came at all. They'd sit as far from each other as they could. There was talk that Germans has caused it with some sort of secret weapon, and I think people wanted to believe that, because it saved them from reflecting on what other meaning it might have.

How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened.

There is something real signified by that word 'just' that proper language won't acknowledge. It's a little like the German ge-. I regret that I must deprive myself of it. It takes half the point out of telling the story.

Snakes, knives, strangers, darkening in the sky— you felt some things with your whole body. What they might mean.

Love is holy because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

The feeling of an overplus of meaning in reality, a sense that the world cannot at all be accounted for in its own terms, is a profound bond and understanding between and among religious people.

The whole point of Art Must Be Beautiful, Art Must Be Beautiful was to destroy that image of beauty. Because I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspapers. It can be used once, and the next day it's yesterday's news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art - that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time.

ce este arta? Eu simt ca atunci cand privim arta ca pe ceva izolat, ceva sfant, separat de restul vietii, ne indepartam de viata. Arta trebuie sa fie parte din viata. Arta trebuie sa apartina tuturor.

I had come to believe that art must be disturbing, art must ask questions, art must predict the future. If art is just political, it becomes like newspaper. It can be used once, and the next day it's yesterday's news. Only layers of meaning can give long life to art - that way, society takes what it needs from the work over time.