Quotes About Symbolism

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios....

everybody wants a box of chocolates and a long-stemmed rose

I liked the name Frog Brigade because it lent itself to a lot of cool imagery with the whole frog thing.

Caves have carried strong symbolic resonance for as long as there has been sacred legend. It might be tempting to say that it began with Plato's "allegory of the cave" in The Republic, which explores the interplay between shadows and reality (or in contemporary terms, perhaps, between virtual and actual reality).

I call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my book. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

In complex trains of thought, signs are indispensable.

The ideal symbolic site indeed for the new pyramids is, as originally at Los Alamos, the desert, for that is the ultimate environment, done over and more perfectly sterilized by the machine process, which corresponds to the ideology itself.

Tolstoi felt that the strange dark room he had awakened in, far from home, was a coffin. As in the womb-dream of childhood, he felt himself floating in an oppressive nothingness. No better image could be found for the state of modern man. That collective coffin is now the envelope of our whole 'civilization': not only materialized but accurately symbolized in underground shelters and military control centers: the technocratic tomb of tombs.

In short, without man's cumulative capacity to give symbolic form to experience, to reflect upon it and re-fashion it and project it, the physical universe would be as empty of meaning as a handless clock: its ticking would tell nothing. The mindfulness of man makes the difference.

The word which denotes the act of baptizing, according to the usage of Greek writers, uniformly signifies or implies immersion.

Linguists have noticed that across the history of language some words start out as obvious, conscious metaphors and then slowly embed themselves in our daily usage in such a way that we're no longer aware that they are metaphors.

I don't use a hat as a prop. I use it as a part of me.

I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.

As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

From creating a new sovereign to affairs of the heart, majestic moments to everyday life, when monarchy wants to send a message it uses a photograph.

Science always uses metaphor.

I started calling myself the Pied Piper, when I started using the flute sound in my music.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

The photograph of the Queen sitting stiffly across the table from Glasgow resident Susan McCarron is so natural and expressive that it looks utterly fake. It looks like an artist's portrait, complete with symbolism, humour and poignancy. No wonder the palace and the press have interpreted it in such different ways.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.