Quotes About Symbolism

In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the profundity of life is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, common as it may be, that we have before our eyes. It becomes the symbol of it.

Rather than implore a tear of the world, Alive, I'd invite the crows To bleed my tainted carcass.

For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.

Once in a dream I saw a snake swallowing its own tail, it swallowed and swallowed until it got halfway round, and there it stopped and there it stayed, it was stuffed with its own self. Some fix, that. We only have ourselves to go on, and it's enough…

I'll use the knives for spreading jam, and the gas to warm my greying love.

there are policemen in the street and angels in the clouds

the sea is made of blood

evolution is written on the wings of butterflies

The number-shape duality in Greek numbers made it easy; after all, zero didn't

but on the ridgeline up by Magic Meadows there's a place where the trees are all flattened outwards in a circle and there's a scorched symbol in the dirt, kinda like a five-pointed star with an eye in the middle, like the Brotherhood

It is so American, fire. So like us. Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

The woven belt once worn around the waist by both men and women symbolized the participation of individuals in society, their place in the community, and the agreement to be, quite literally, bound by its rules. When the reverse was practised, taking off one's belt signified a readiness to enter the realm of the spirits. For women, the power could be amplified by unbraiding their hair, as mentioned above.

When the moon rose late in the night, people said it was refusing food, as a sullen husband refuses his wife's food when they have quarrelled.

Its body was carved with men and pythons and little steps were cut on one side; without these the drummer could not climb to the top to beat it. When the Ikolo was beaten for war it was decorated with skulls won in past wars. But now it sang of peace.

The rainbow began to appear, and sometimes two rainbows, like a mother and her daughter, the one young and beautiful, and the other an old and faint shadow. The rainbow was called the python of the sky.

Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.

elle lui mettait la clef de l'amour en la serrure du cœur.

But when you want to mark a number on an abacus, what do you do if there are no stones in a column? The number 60 is one wedge in the sixties column and no wedges in the ones column. How do you write "no wedges"? The Babylonians needed a placeholder that represented nothing. They had to, in effect, invent zero. And so they created a new character, with no value, to signify an empty column. They denoted it with two slanted wedges.

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.

In a bar mitzvah, you do the candle-lighting ceremony with the cake. Every birthday, the cake is the big moment.

Comics deal with fundamental archetypes. We've been called the myth-makers of the modern age.

I think you can't have the monarchy without the coronation. I think you would have to get rid of the whole kit and caboodle.

One thing that's a lot harder to put into stories than you'd think is the idea of a traditional monster, because monsters with a capital 'M' don't inherently lend themselves to a story about your character. Unless one of your characters is themselves the monster, simply having a monster leads to a chase or a hunt.

It appears to be monumental only because it's art.