Quotes About Significance

People look for greatness only in the extraordinary and completely overlook the wonder of the ordinary.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn. - Lot's Wife

Literature is an act which gives meaning to experience.

He had never said her name. Indeed, he couldn't say it. Not because he's forgotten it. Mot certainly he hadn't forgotten it. It was the dread of the capitulation of it, of the handing over of himself in it, of what it might take from him to pay her the compliment of letting her know he really knew her name.

Still, I didn't like the implication that I had contracted an incurable beyond the pale.

I think that a real artist should irrevocably and completely dedicate herself to art. ... I have realized that true art gives joy not only to the artist but also to the people, suspending them for a moment from life's sorrows. In this I see the great significance of art, and the awareness of this became the aim of my life. ...

Built to celebrate Yaroslav's father Volodymyr's conversion to Christianity, Santa Sofia was intended as, and remains, a place of huge political and spiritual significance. Under the tsars, pilgrims came in millions. (A mournful early graffito reads, 'I drank away my clothes when I was here'.)3

?k voltak a tartály fenekén a legfenségesebb angolnák, és mint a dÅ'lt bet?k, felismerték egymást.

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

They were two superior eels at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

How important is it to be 'important' as a writer?

Whoever touches you touches the apple of his eye. ZECHARIAH 2:8

I believe I went through a divorce. My relationship with Ellen is no less significant as a marriage than my relationship to Coley.

When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.

Names are like codes, yes? Like magic codes. They have everything that ever happened to you squeezed tightly inside them.

Watching the tiny shrimp and snails on the sea whips, I realized that those moments between birth and death are exactly what we have in life. If we just pay full attention to each of them as we live it, the universe will tell us what it's about. And I strongly suspected that it was as much about sea whips and snails as it was about humans.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

And telling you I care about you is a waste of time. I wouldn't have crossed the ocean, come out of hiding, tracked you down, if you didn't matter to me.

we miss the opportunity to marvel at our wonders because we have so much set up still to do that what we have done pales into insignificance in relation to what is (always!) yet to be done. Ugly is in the eye of the beholder. TODAY is awareness day for what I have accomplished. Celebrations may be in order.

When we view these upticks and downticks under the magnification of that in-the-moment zoom lens, our emotional responses are, similarly, amplified. Like the flat tire in the rain, we are capable of treating things that will have little effect on our long-term happiness as having significant impact.

Sí… Nos olvidarán. ¡Ese es nuestro sino, contra el que nada se puede!… ¡Lo que ahora nos parece serio, significativo, de gran importancia…, llegará el día en que lo olvidemos o se nos antoje poco importante!…

Il sait maintenant détacher les jarretelles. J'écris cela parce que, plus tard, c'est cela qui sera important, ce détail.)

As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child.