Quotes About Meaning

A story is a really weird art object that should contain life but not be enslaved by the banality.

How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?

In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We'd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning.

What a story is "about" is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring. So: What do you care about in this story, so far? It's Marya.

Every day starts out as a certain day, dear reader, which, when it begins, we call today. Hence, every day, as we wake to a new today, we must assume that today may be the day. For what, though? That is what is unknown, that is what I must find out, and quickly now: for what will each of my coming todays henceforth be for?

Art, at its best, is a kind of uncontrolled yet disciplined Yelp, made by one of us who, because of the brain he was born with and the experiences he has had and the training he has received, is able to emit a Yelp that contains all of the joys, miseries, and contradictions of life as it is actually lived.

Language is a meaning approximator that sometimes gets too big for its britches and deceives us

causation is what creates the appearance of meaning. "The queen died, and then the king died" (E. M. Forster's famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn't mean anything. "The queen died, and the king died of grief " puts those events into relation; we understand that one caused the other.

We tend, in discussion, to reduce stories to plot (what happens). We feel, correctly, that something of their meaning resides there. But stories also mean through their internal dynamics—the manner in which they unfold, the way one part interacts with another, the instantaneous, felt, juxtaposition of elements.

None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear. These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy-broth, but then we named them, and loved them, and, in this way, brought them forth. And now must lose them. I

After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

George Steiner

Existimos para la oscuridad». ¿Esto

The news brought by annunciations not only stays new; it can be unendurable in its ambiguity.

Only language knows no conceptual, no projective finality.

any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is . . . underwritten by the assumption of God's presence.

Las narraciones son ensayos para la muerte.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation (onomatopoeia), has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

Los idiolectos del pensamiento, las privacidades de lo no dicho son de un orden mucho más profundo e inalcanzable.

We are the 'other ones' whom the living significations of the aesthetic seek out.

I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of man's access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask 'what is music?' may well be one way of asking 'what is man?

Tot ceea ce putem spune despre limb?, ca ÅŸi despre moarte este, într- un anumit sens, un adev?r inaccesibil.

I felt as if I were living only in order to be more aware that I was dead.

Intimacy is never separated from external elements, without which it could not be signified. Where we think we have caught hold of the Grail, we have only grasped a thing, and what is left in our hands is only a cooking pot.