Quotes About Meaning

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

What is a spell after all but a way of coaxing syllables together so persuasively that some new word is spelled...some imprecision clarified, some name Named...and some change managed.

What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?

Chopin's theme, a simple descending descant the first time round, articulated itself in the repeat with nuanced embellishment. It was music remembering itself. It meant something different, something more, to hear those simple phrases repeated so soon, qualified by chromatic variations. Clarifications. Not redundancy, but a hypothesis about how consolation works. A second chance at getting it. A second chance at life.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get—the more specificity you harvest—the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm.

Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn't ironic in the end.

It never is the who, is it? It's always the why. -Elphaba

She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.

We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our license to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.

I have so few choices, really, if I can't get myself back home. Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end—you go out far enough in the direction of—somewhere—and you realize that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything.

Para a alma, cada instante sempre é um minuto mais próximo do julgamento

Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn't it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

Your life and times don't drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).

Well, that's not poetry, that's propaganda, and not even good propaganda at that.

We are all migrants. We are exiled from the place where meaning meant something.

Given a long enough time, of course, a wide enough frame, there is nothing said or done, ever, that isn't ironic in the end.

We are only missionaries for the world, after all, and when our work is done we really don't exist. Do we? Can it be said for anyone?

I know Oz, now, she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. Usually letters don't hide inside each other, she told Glinda firmly. No, that's true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding...

Without a memory, what does experience mean -- or matter?

Well, I might be all or none of the things you say, said Boq staunchly, but you will learn that I am persistent. I will not let you say no to our friendship, Galinda. It means too much to me. Behold the male beast roaring in the jungle for his mate, said Elphaba. See how the female beast giggles behind a shrub while she organizes her face to say, Pardon dear, did you say something?

The premise is prejudicial and proves that what's wanted here isn't a trial but a conviction.

Is there - is there need in the Afterlife?

Para mí, ése es el auténtico poder del arte. No amonestar, sino provocar y desafiar. De otro modo, ¿para qué molestarse?

All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn't we hear a voice of prophecy