#meanings

To me, the writer's main job is to just make the story unscroll in such a way that the reader is snared - she's right there, seeing things happen and caring about them. And if you dedicate yourself to this job, the meanings more or less take care of themselves. That's the theory, anyway. ↗

— George Saunders

#anyway #care #caring #dedicate #happen

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go. ↗

— George Saunders

#any #approach #become #crystal #deep

I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus. ↗

— Julie Taymor

#being #had #i #meanings #never

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art. ↗

— Jerome Bruner

#deep #effort #emerge #experience #explain

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings. ↗

— Henri Bergson

#always #comic #different #each #events

Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture. ↗

— David Bohm

#compulsive #conform #constitute #culture #distortion

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations. ↗

— Alfred Adler

#determined #give #meanings #ourselves #situations

Unless followed by the world 'education', liberal has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank those who made it the name, first of a political, and then a religious, party. The same irresponsible rapacity, the desire to appropriate a word for its 'selling-power', has often done linguistic mischief. It is not easy now to say at all in English what the word conservative would have said if it had not been 'cornered' by politicians. Evangelical, intellectual, rationalist, and temperance have been destroyed in the same way. Sometimes the arrogation is so outrageous that it fails; the Quakers have not killed the word friends. And sometimes so many different people grab at the coveted word for so many different groups or factions that, while it is spoiled for its original purpose, none of the grabbers achieve secure possession. Humanist is an example; it will probably end by being a term of eulogy as vague as gentleman. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#meanings #words #education

The difference between a top-flight creative man and the hack is his ability to express powerful meanings indirectly. ↗

— Vance Packard

#between #creative #creative man #difference #express

I have become intrigued with the combining of seemingly unrelated ideas or images, or the drawing upon the many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings a word might have. ↗

— John Barton

#combining #dissimilar #drawing #i #ideas