Quotes About Symbolism

I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.

Things like 'mad as a hatter' or 'grinning like a Cheshire cat', are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.

Left ear, I wear four earrings. The four is symbolic of the four seasons, spring, winter, summer and fall, the four directions, north, east, south and west, the four gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn't it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.

A bird in the house is a sign someone will die soon.

I know Oz, now, she said, and in the carving of the lintel she found that common ideogram, a Z circled with an O. Usually letters don't hide inside each other, she told Glinda firmly. No, that's true. In Oz, I suppose, something is always hiding...

Maurice Maeterlinck's play The Blue Bird.

This phenomenon of pareidolia explains why we see the Man in the Moon or the face of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich (which, by the way, sold for $28,000).

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

Como si la plenitud del alma no se desborda algunas veces en las metáforas más vacías

If you make a man a symbol of things that are bigger than any one person can possibly be, you risk stripping that man of his sense of who he really is.

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.

In his left hand he was holding aloft the German flag; with his right he was shaking hands in smiling effusion with a bald-headed man whose face looked like a pot of lard that has boiled over and eventually congealed in white, flabby, unhealthy drifts and folds.

It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto, In God we trust, were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, Verboten, substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet.

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

Los sabios interpretan los sueños, y los dioses se ríen.

Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated.

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman's doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with so much as half a word. All her life is symbolized in the only words which she knows in her dotage. Please do; and, God bless you.

Narcissism is our religion. The selfie stuck is our cross, and we must carry it everywhere.