Quotes About Significance

When I choose what I do, I ask, 'Does it make a difference?'

Always when I play I want to play well and make a difference.

I think I make a difference. I mean a lot to my people. I've done well. They're proud of me.

I do not care about the length of my role. But it should make a difference to the story.

I want to leave a mark on society.

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

Everything in the least connected with him has value for me; if someone even mentions his name it is like a little present to me-and I long to mention it myself

As long as I live I shall remember that silent minute.

The grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening.

It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.

This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.

We must be equal to the largeness of things.

You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.

When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.

Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your causal gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children

What's the point of waking up in the morning if you don't try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

They seemed to shine together at the center of things. They made things theirs. A certain bench in the park, near the chess players, ordinary things, not unusual in any way.

What did I read just the other day? there are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra? I'd just as soon die while I'm trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book.' I looked at my son. I said, 'Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?

This is what long journeys are for. To see what's back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father's situation, that you'll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations. He

These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of species. What could be more useless than a man who couldn't fix a dripping faucet—fundamentally useless, dead to history, to the messages in his genes? I wasn't sure I disagreed.