How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.
The artist in all societies has traditionally been a kind of barometer, more sensitive to nuances and changes than others, because he is more deeply immersed in his culture and more interested in its meanings.
She loved him so much she concealed his name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her.
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.
The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.
I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.
Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings.
You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.
We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
It's meanings that we need to coax into our lives.
I know you lawyers can with ease, Twist words and meanings as you please; That language, by your skill made pliant, Will bend to favour every client; That 'tis the fee directs the sense, To make out either side's pretense.
In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.
Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.