Quotes About Symbolism

the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.

The Ka'ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a "navel spot": a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revolves, the link between the earth and the solid dome of heaven.

Quemar dinero inocente es un acto de canibalismo

OK.… A blue feather." He looked at me blankly. "Richard? A blue feather?

If you will die for me, I will die for you and our graves will be like two lovers washing their clothes together in a laundromat If you will bring the soap I will bring the bleach.

You've got some 'Star-Spangled' nails in your coffin, kid. That's what they've done for you, son.

A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose.

The wolfish horror of the worst scriptural verses is cloaked under various forms of sheep's clothing: the words are not meant to be taken literally, they are 'metaphorical'.

Arta reprezentationala de toate tipurile (si, probabil, arta non-reprezentationala de asemenea) depinde de observatia ca un lucru poate tine locul altuia si ca aceasta substitutie poate fi utila pentru gandire sau comunicare.

On his death bed, the eighteenth-century haiku poet Shisui had finally responded to requests for a death poem by grabbing his brush, painting his poem, and dying. On the paper Shisui's shocked followers saw he had painted a circle.

death poem of Hyakka

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes.

The work of art is a pyramid which stands in the desert, uselessly: jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it;

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.

she wonders whether the Holy Ghost, conventionally represented as a dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and Holy Ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot.

They really 'did,' you know, he said softly, suddenly. Did? She was puzzled. The roses. Remind me of you. They're precisely the sort of flowers you ought to have. Those spectacular, throbbing, lush blooms that now stood guard over her bed. With petals unconscionably soft.

My brother wrote another refrigerator magnet poem, when he was probably nineteen or twenty: 'When the flood comes/ I will swim to a symphony/ go by boat to some picture show/ and maybe I will forget about you.' How did he know way, way back then? How is it I know only now?

dream interpretation were ways of converting our little personal miseries into big robust myths

If one accepted such reasoning, I who had lost my face was destined to be shut up forever in a solitary cell … with no roadway … and so a mask became invested with a terribly profound meaning.

For me, whatever you may say, you are the most important "other person." No, I do not mean it in a negative sense. I mean that the one who must first restore the roadway, the one whose name I had to write on the first letter, was first on my list of "others." (Under any circumstances, I simply did not want to lose you. To lose you would be symbolic of losing the world.)

The snake…had reached out intentionally to this thing and put it in its stomach, rendering itself immobile. Akane was gripped by an ominous feeling. What if the snake symbolized her own future? What then?

England was a cold, backward, rebellious little kingdom. It's king: Henry the Eighth, remembered principally for his six wives and the chicken legs clutched in his fat fists.

One day, she said, I'll catch dreams like butterflies. And then what? he asked. Then I'll put them between the pages of big, fat books and press them until they're words. Suppose there's someone who never dreams of anything but you? Maybe then we're both words in a book. Two names among all the others.