Quotes About Symbolism

I've always said the rubber duck is a yellow catalyst.

Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two.

Some people hate lime-green; red has all this emotional baggage. Blue seems to be overall one of the more positive colors, and a little more serious than yellow.

Purple and yellow are my colors.

You may say, 'Well, dragons don't exist.' It's, like, yes they do - the category 'predator' and the category 'dragon' are the same category. It absolutely exists. It's a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

Most of the people who are given these Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame things sell millions of records, so it's kind of like a trophy for them. But for the Ramones, it really was a symbolic gesture of, 'Yes, you guys are special and are important to rock n' roll.' So in that sense, the Roll Hall of Fame served its purpose.

In ancient African cultures, a young man was not considered a full member of the tribe, an elder, a man. He couldn't marry and he couldn't own land until he had killed a lion. It was symbolic.

Wheresoever thou findest a high mountain or a lofty hill and a green tree, know that an idol is there!

The tree has been always an allegory for spiritual growth.

Hardcover and paperback forever. Someone carve that into a tree.

Even as a little kid I knew that spinning a dreidel on the floor for literal pennies was a sad consolation for the joys of trimming a Christmas tree.

To me, a bag in a tree is like a flag of chaos, and when I remove it, I'm capturing the flag of the other side. In the end, it doesn't matter how ironic or serious or even effective on a larger scale bag snagging may be.

While most Americans know about the Boston Tea Party, few are aware of the Liberty Tree and how important it was to fanning the flames of rebellion that led to the revolution in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence.

I got a random tattoo the other day. It's a red triangle, which makes everyone think I'm arty, which I'm not. I used to draw red triangles all the time. It must mean something - maybe I don't know it yet. But I'll figure it out.

I don't mind being a symbol but I don't want to become a monument. There are monuments all over the Parliament Buildings and I've seen what the pigeons do to them.

Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms.

Symbolic representation makes it possible for instinctual impulses to find disguised, socially acceptable forms of gratification, not as satisfying as direct physical pleasure, but a reasonable compromise with necessary social constraints. Thus

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

Isn't that what fairy tales are, anyway? What we tell ourselves about ourselves, just in an indirect way, with elves and magic and monsters to make it all safe?

Virgins can't die. Their hymens are like armor.

It's stupid being superstitious like that, he knows, but if you don't have private little rituals, the days can lose their meaning real fast.

That is what the boats and birds and children symbolized: creatures at rest within themselves and in harmony with their environment. Not fighting it, but accepting it, shaping it and being shaped by it to live in it and beyond it.

The clerk tripped on the carpet, hit a window and went through, carrying with him a vase which had been on the sill. His skull broke like the vase and the vase broke like his skull, and both burst forth water mainly, and from the vase some flowers. If I could choose a death I'd make it something like that, except I'd add a good woman and some lard.