Quotes About Symbolism

Teddy Lamont couldn't be more gay if he turned up wearing rainbows and carrying a pride flag.

I saw the crown of France laying on the ground, so I picked it up with my sword.

A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.

Men will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.

A woman's breasts welcome illusion and the imaginative opportunities of clothing.

We lived so long and so self-consciously that we assumed we must live forever, and we buried our dead with enough talismans and spare change for eternity.

Elk inspired people; they were a symbol of everything that was special about living here.

National identity is, of course, historically constructed; but it is nevertheless symbolized by a flag and an anthem, materialized by administrative acts and by material boundaries, the object of emotional projections that make people speak, make them act and even, sometimes, fight.

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.

It's true. I......I wanted to be born in the year of the cat......!

When we speak of "branding" today, we should remember that it was at one time literal: with a hot iron pressed against human flesh.

Admito que es un tanto injusto esperar que los educadores encuentren, por sí solos, relatos que puedan reafirmar nuestra cultura nacional. Unas narraciones así deben llegarles, hasta cierto punto, de la esfera política. Si nuestra política está empobrecida simbólicamente, resulta difícil imaginar cómo pueden proporcionar los profesores un objetivo de peso a la educación.

Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man's symbolic activity advances.

He has so enveloped himself in linguistic forms, in artistic images, in mythical symbols or religious rites that he cannot see or know anything except by the interposition of [an] artificial medium.

Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged, which is a way of saying that the "truth" is a kind of cultural prejudice. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant.

As you know, all of the Bible stories are your stories; its characters live only in the mind of man. They have no reference at all to any person, who lived in time and space, or to any event that ever occurred upon earth.

No matter that we were defending a Mafia club. The Stonewall was a symbol, just as the leveling of the Bastille had been. No matter that only six prisoners had been in the Bastille and one of those was Sade, who clearly deserved being locked up. No one chooses the right symbolic occasion; one takes what's available.

Napoleon marched up the aisle with the Iron Crown under his arm and put it on his own head

was said to have been made from the nails that had pinned Jesus to the cross.

And as he spoke of understanding, I looked up and saw the rainbow leap with flames of many colors over me.

Her heart was red outside and all clogged up at its centre like a ripe ball of Edam.

She did not mention her dream of the ammonite, snaking heavy and solid into the bones of her hand.

Human cultures kept the oddest gestures.

She stood alone at the empty heart of a gone god, staff in the crook of her arm, one hand on her seax and the other on her cross. She would not wear and weather. She was Yffing. She would be totem and token for her people, the light of the world.