Quotes About Symbolism

But when a girl gives a boy a dead squid - that had to mean something.

In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

The bullets are gun-eggs," Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched.

I don't want to be a simile anymore," I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

In the fecund shock-waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists' own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were symbols from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the surrealists' ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon.

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

They (wise people) speak of the indestructible ASHWATTHA tree* as having its roots above and branches below, whose leaves are the

A pyramid signifies hierarchy, yet no hierarchy is evident in the Food Pyramid.

Even if I wasn't a Japanophile, I would still use chopsticks all the time, for all kinds of cuisine. Especially salads, which can be unwieldy on a fork. The cultural difference between selecting your food and stabbing it is symbolic of the quiet simplicity of the East versus the blunt directness of the West.

The cultural difference between selecting your food and stabbing it is symbolic of the quiet simplicity of the East versus the blunt directness of the West. Chopsticks are a little tricky to master at first, but once you do, it can eventually seem a bit crude that you used to poke and prod at your meal with forks and knives.

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety and we are free to watch it go. This is the triumph. This is called globalisation. 2

I found the little bottle of nail varnish at the bottom of a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I ever discover the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost of one British pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because this is what I did in that place, to remind myself I was alive underneath everything; under my steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish.

Tonight, we light the symbolic flashlight of under-the-covers reading to celebrate those page-turners we can never put down, even on a school night. I am assured that our Olympic torch will never reach a temperature of Fahrenheit four fifty-one, something the Lorax, the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe were all quite happy to hear.

We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.

Art supercedes what's personal.

The desktop held a patina of hieroglyphs representing years of student boredom—names and initials gouged into the wood, blackened by grime and pencil, shellacked over, then cobwebbed again with another generation's imprint.

His mind immediately seized on this metaphor and when he looked down at his wet hands he saw that they had taken on the elongated, dual clawed form of an ant's bristly pretarsus.

The hands clasped together symbolize friendship. The heart is love. And the crown stands for loyalty

From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina's World.

Know what a symbol is?...Shit that stands for shit.

Ritual is the way you carry the presence of the sacred. Ritual is the spark that must not go out.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb' (Andre Breton qtd. p. 55)

Flint An emerald is as green as grass, A ruby red as blood; A sapphire shines as blue as heaven; A flint lies in the mud. A diamond is a brilliant stone, To catch the world's desire; An opal holds a fiery spark; But a flint holds fire.