Quotes About Meaning

So God just leaves?" John asked, angry where Emilio had been desolate. "Abandons creation? You're on your own, apes. Good luck!" "No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.

I want to belong with someone. I want to feel at the center of something, and not the edge. I want children and grandchildren. I don't want to grow old and die, knowing that when I die, there will be no more like me.

I've seen what human beings can do- You've seen what... but not why! That's where God is, Anne. In the why of it - in the meaning

If pain and injustice and undeserved misery are part of the package, and God knows they are, then surely the life of Christ is God's own answer to Ecclesiasticus! Redeem the suffering. Embrace it. Make it mean something.

Kinda spooky, ain't it. Hell of a lot of coincidences. Like we say back home, when you find a turtle settin' on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty damn sure he didn't get there on his own.

compensating for utter vacuity with numerically staggering indulgence, hoping to make up in sheer repetition of experience what was missing in depth and meaning.

He wondered then if Jesus expected gratitude as Lazarus emerged, stinking, from the crypt. Maybe Lazarus was a disappointment to everyone, too.

Demons especially enjoy metaphors.

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning.

But unless you're looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You'll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He's missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story. Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.

I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed.

If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Of course, it isn't. Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life.

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world.

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?