Quotes About Significance

And the way he looks at me-it's like he's finally realized how real I am, how here I am. What I've just said isn't worth that. Which means I must be worth that.

But there are moments—either in your own life or the life of the world around you—when an event looks you right in the eye and says: This is important. What are you going to do?

Lo único que sé es que quiero algo auténtico. Sé que soy joven y que «auténtico» no significa «para siempre», [...] pero quiero sentir que la vida importa.

The hundred possibilities a situation contains may be more significant than the occurrence of any of them, and metaphor truer in the long run than fact.

What if I'd wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn't really matter? Try as I might, I still can't wrap my mind around it.

I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of people I've never even met.

On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it—isn't that what we've all been waiting for?

Why, after all these years, do I still believe that expensive clothing signifies anything more than a disposable income, that tweed and cashmere actually bespeak refinement?

It's pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I'll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I'll wave it in someone's face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I'm smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don't have a life.

We tend to think of the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of England. But the Saxon Conquest was even more important, since it created both the reality and the idea of England itself.

In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.

You've taught me that we're all needed, even those who sometimes think we're worthless, plain and dull. If we love and allow ourselves to be loved...well, a person who loves is the most precious thing in the world, worth all the fortunes that ever were. That's what you've taught me, fur face,and because of you I'll never be the same.

In our lives, we come to moments of great significance that we fail to recognize, the meaning of which sometimes does not occur to us for many years. Each of us has his agenda and focuses on it, and therefore we are often blind to what is before our eyes.

In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.

Some dreams matter. Most don't. Often it can be hard to know which might be which.

Most of the people I meet, including my daughter, have only the most trivial grasp of time.

The notion that too much information can be a distraction is off the mark. The quantity of information is irrelevant; it is the relevance of any quantity that matters.

No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It's for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble : Beach Raindrop : Ocean Needle : Haystack

Once they were the same age. Now Leah is aging in dog years. Her thirty-five is seven times his, and seven times more important, so important he has to keep reminding her of the numbers, in case she forgets.

Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.

She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance.

she made you feel that just being in this moment, doing this thing, was the most important and marvellous possibility for you.

And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable.

A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.