Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
Humanity is the higher meaning of our planet, the nerve that connects this part of it with the upper world, the eye it raises to heaven.
All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.
Her existence alone was excuse enough to justify the creation of the entire world.
Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.
I hate the word universal, because I don't know exactly what it means. The question is, does it work for the client? Travelers was a diversified, financial conglomerate that did very well. The businesses had nothing to do with each other.
That's what I love about songwriting - that you can write something about your own experiences and think it's completely specific to you, and then people can take away a completely different meaning for themselves. I really love that. I think you've been successful at writing a song when it has a larger life than yourself.
I want my words to survive translation.
The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.
There is a divine purpose behind everything - and therefore a divine presence in everything.
You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.
There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for.
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.
Even though I loved the song [My Yiddish Momme] and it was a sensational hit every time I sang it, I was always careful to use it only when I knew the majority of the house would understand Yiddish. However, you didn't have to be a Jew to be moved by 'My Yiddish Momme.' 'Mother' in any language means the same thing.
I don't think there is a hidden purpose to the universe that you have to puzzle out.
The world is a great poem, and the world's The words it is writ in, and we souls the thoughts.
I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.
If I'm speaking it means that in one way or another when I say, "I'm cold" it belongs to me: I'm cold. But just by saying this it becomes general.
Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see.
It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
The human race, whose intelligence dates back only a single tick of the astronomical clock, could hardly hope to understand so soon what it all means.
When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public.
