Quotes About Meaning

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.

But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.

I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away.

Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death? I guess it depends on how you die.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, "It's true. There aren't any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words." I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could then transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted?

I don't know what it means to live.

Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,' she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. So what does that really mean? In simple terms. I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. I think it means, I say, that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.

I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.

Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

She was, if anything, on the plain side, at least not the type to attract men wherever she went. But there was something in her face that was meant for me alone. Everytime we met, I took a good look at her. And loved what I saw.

Sometimes we don't need words. Rather, it's words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren't spoken are no longer words.

But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life? Word games, I dismissed. Every army needs a flag.

And you'll return to real life. You need to live it to the fullest. No matter how shallow and dull things might get, this life is worth living. I guarantee it.

Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.

I want to believe you, but if that's true, I just don't get it. Why does loving somebody mean you have to hurt them just as much? I mean, if that's the way it goes, what's the point of loving someone?

The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird

An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence

I would stare at the grains of light suspended in that silent space, struggling to see into my own heart. What did I want? And what did others want from me? But I could never find the answers. Sometimes I would reach out and try to grasp the grains of light, but my fingers touched nothing.

And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That's the city

As long as I was alive, I was something. That was just how it was. But somewhere along the way it all changed. Living turned me into nothing.