Quotes About Symbolism

The red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives

We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds.

The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom, to be noted on the card.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ideas. Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the how above the what but do not let it be confused with the so what. Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.

From far below mounted the clink and tinkle of distant masonry work, and a sudden train passed between gardens, and a heraldic butterfly volant en arrière , sable, a bend gules, traversed the stone parapet, and John Shade took a fresh card.

This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe.

Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.

Tropes are the dreams of speech.

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.

It had glistening eyes like sad black olives.

she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.

behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate

She wrote poetry. She was poetically superstitious. She said she knew she would die soon after my sixteenth birthday, and did.

I not only debar too definite a planet from any role in my story – from the role every dot and full stop should play in my story (which I see as a kind of celestial chart).

It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament.

The naked human body is the grave in blossom: it is both Sad & instructive.

There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.

From then on Dirmit wrapped herself up in a quilt made of words. She slept on a bed of words and sat on a chair of words. Atiye became thousands of words whos days were numbered. NuÄŸber sat waiting for words. Zekiye wept words. Seyit smiled with his gleaming white teeth made of false words. Mahmut pressed his tongue against his teeth and whistled words. Halit banged words on the wall.

Shouldn't the preacher who married the couple in the first place have to fly back in on a broomstick for that, too—that moving on? Shouldn't there be some ritual involving a long walk over hot coals while all the guests who'd been at the wedding watched, weeping, throwing stones at your bare

Hidden in the works of a mysterious clock are her many deaths, and yet the whole world is piled up before her on a banquet table again today. The timer, broken.

It is some water lilies and a skull in a decorative pond, and a tiny goldfish swimming like an animated change-purse made of brightness and surprises observing the moment through its empty eye.