I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words. ” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.
Words are like bodies; meanings are like souls.
The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.
Not all meanings are meant to be clear at once. Some ideas take time. Some words are designed to lead us on inner journeys, with truth hidden deep inside them.
There are readers who want every point to be clearly and unambiguously set forth, and there are those who want to pry ideas and meanings out for themselves.
It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man's principal toy and tool: without the meanings and values it sustains, all man's other tools would be worthless.
The meanings of words are not in the words, they are in us.
When you read and understand a poem, comprehending its rich and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.
The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
There's a certain Slant of light, Winter afternoons— That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes— Heavenly Hurt, it gives us— We can find no scar, But internal difference, Where the Meanings, are. . . . When it comes, the Landscape listens— Shadows—hold their breath— When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death.
When I personally feel like I belong to the world, it is because I am with people I love in places I love. So I decided that would be my solution. I set All the World in a place I love - the central coast region of Southern California - and populated it with people and things that I love. I stopped worrying that I wasn't representing every place, every person, every possible experience. And I hoped that through this personal expression of mine, others would find their own personal meanings as well.
One line plus one line results in many meanings.
People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.
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.
This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.
I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once agian: My mother and I never really understood one another. We translated each other's meanings and I seemed to hear less than what was said, while my mother heard more. No doubt she told Auntie Lin I was going back to school to get a doctorate.
What is very exciting with children is they like to play, and they don't care so much about the meanings [of things], and they are just excited to have weird scenes to do or weird things to do, like playing deaf, or playing sick, or swimming in the water.
We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.