meaning

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There's nothing magical in them at all. Magic is only what books mean, what books say. How they stitch the patterns of the universe together into one garment for us.

As it is?

Nature never remembers, that__ why she__ beautiful.

And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others__s well as to ourselves__he sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]

Many men beg for a job but have no clue what hard work really means.

How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.

I realized that I had the choice. I could give this moment a meaning, or I could choose to ignore it. It just depended on the kind of story I wanted to tell myself.

Once upon a time, when I was young, his forgetting might have rendered my memory meaningless. I no longer require so much from life.

If love and beauty were easy to find, they would not exist.Chaos and sadness exist in order for you to find the love and beauty in them. So that love and beauty mean something.It's meant to be hard.

There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.

Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we're given.

I wonder now if [the gods] take from us that which we love so we must seek them, if only to scavenge for meaning in this existence.

If I let the past and my goals be the only thing that drives me in life, I will never know the meaning of being happy.

Education is that component which brings in a meaningful relationship between the happenings around us and how our senses experience them.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.