Quotes About Symbolism

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

A bridge is a meeting place . . . a possibility, a metaphor.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t'aime.

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

Photographers, it is true, do not work but they do do something: They create, process, and store symbols.

You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.

The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.

movies have mirrored our moods and myths since the century began. They have taken on some of the work of religion.

In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado.

Our band has always been really big on imagery. We've kind of used that as one of our strengths; we tend to do that pretty well.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

We go to Europe, and they think we're totally prejudiced 'cause we hang the bars and stripes. But for us, the bars and stripes doesn't mean we want to see anybody in slavery or anything like that. It's just our heritage. To us, the bars and stripes means grits, 'y'all,' and the beauty of the South. There's no prejudice at all in that with us.

The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

On the first season of our show, I commissioned a Native American artist to make up, 'cause I'm known for the tomahawk, besides the hair and the leather outfit and the whole thing.

Every president makes the Oval Office theirs.

The crossing of the Red Sea is, according to the allegorical or symbolic meaning, really the entrance into matter. Water always stands for matter in the esoteric wisdom. The well-known story of the forty years the Jews spent wandering in the wilderness was a mythical construct that was symbolic of the soul's life in the body during its earthly sojourn.

While Antony had gazed in sorrow at his fallen adversary on the battlefield of Philippi, his youthful colleague had shed no tears. Instead, ordering Brutus's corpse decapitated, he had packed the head off to Rome. There, with pointed symbolism, it had been placed at the foot of the statue where Caesar had died.

The wedding ring was Christ's own foreskin, removed when he had been circumcised as a child, and still wet with his holy blood.

Chief Bo as the center, dressed, in 2005, in bright red feathers, with beadwork that should be in a museum and probably will be someday