Quotes About Symbolism

Why do people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions, they're killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants? "Sweetheart, let's make up. Have this deceased squirrel."

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.

Fairy tales are another kind of Bible, for those who know how to read them.

more likely that tattooing the name is a substitute for solicitude rather than evidence of it.

In the middle of the kitchen table was an empty birdcage, the metal door ajar. A feeling of deep melancholy washed over her, the empty cage somehow seeming symbolic of Eddie Berlin's life. ~0~

Reply to Objection 1: Cherubim is interpreted "fulness of knowledge," while "Seraphim" means "those who are on fire," or "who set on fire.

For although in that ancient and diffused adoration of Idols, unto the Priests and subtiler heads, the worship perhaps might be symbolical, and as those Images some way related unto their Deities; yet was the Idolatry direct and down-right in the people; whose credulity is illimitable, who may be made believe that any thing is God; and may be made believe there is no God at all.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

libations of milk and wine.

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

My love-lies-bleeding.

Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows' meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen?

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

All God's works are still in a sense symbols of God. Do we not, as I urged, still account it a merit to recognize a certain inexhaustible significance, "poetic beauty" as we name it, in all natural objects whatsoever?

I think it is the fact that birds are two-legged, like us, which gives them something of our balance and gesture and makes them nearer to us.

As much as I love Neil Lane, I don't want to have a ring graveyard.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

I used to have hair so long, my nickname was Pocahontas.

I started drawing a mouse because it was my father's nickname for my mother. And mice are very expressive.

The best monsters are our anxieties given form. They make sense on the level of a dream - or a nightmare.

My dreams are of water. And my nightmares.