Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
Art-the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.
If I can write just one poem that will turn the minds of a few to a more decent outlook...what does it matter if I compose a bad line or lose my reputation as a craftsman?...I used to think it very...
nothing would have meaning, because the knowing was itself the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know.
Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We'll pluck significance from the least consequential...
A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.
Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could...
People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they'll go to any length to live longer. But I don't think that's the reason most people run. Most runners run not because they want to live...
The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful?
Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like Reading in bed, and Giving a bath, and Running while holding the seat of a bicycle. Parenthood contains...
Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar----paying for the privilege of sanity with...
When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning-human meaning, that is-is defined by them. You have to admit...
The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian was a lead bombardier who had been...
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
the full fury of his storming countenance with its rugged overhang of gullied forehead and huge crag...
Keep in mind that when we talk of a great painting we are not really talking about anything great....
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...