Evolving Meaning Quotes

An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.

A song has a life of its own. It's an autonomous thing, separate from your own experience, almost. And the mere repetition of it means it's subject to change; it means approaching it differently, expressing different emotional aspects of it. It doesn't feel like wallowing.

With 'Philharmonics,' I had to do a lot of interviews, and it was like I was corrupting something. In many ways, I've said everything in the song. And either I can't go back to what it was because it's changing when I play it, or I still haven't figured out what the song is about.

To me, the songs that I'm most thankful to have been a part of creating are the songs that are able to adapt and change over the years and that mean different things to you at different periods of time in your life.

The songs themselves do broaden out as time passes and take on subtly different meanings, take on more meaning, I find.

What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.

'If You Could Read My Mind' is a different experience every time I sing it. It's just that kind of a song.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

Whatever the framers … intended, there is no reason to believe that they possessed the best insights or ultimate wisdom as to the meaning of their words for subsequent generations ... Words do not have fixed meanings.