Quotes About Symbolism

When we speak of God as a person, we ought to be conscious of the fact that we use an allegory which, if it were taken literally, can only belittle him.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

Da ward sie zu einer Kuh; er aber ward zu einem Stier und begattete sich mit derselben. Daraus entstand das Rindvieh.

I imagined face and genitals to be the corresponding poles of the female sex, when girls wept I thought of pudenda weeping in unison.

She went to Ed's body, and kneeled, dipped her finger in the sticky blood around his feet. With it, she drew a crude circle on her chest - it took several attempts - and a capital R inside the circle.

That was the nature of presents. You kept them in the giver's stead. They were a small part of that person to keep.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.

I have put my soul and trust in flowers. Occult flowers, flowers of premonition.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

What we find to love or to hate comes to us as a substitute for something else.

While we watched, he dragged over a chair and climbed on top of it to pound a small copper peg into the upper-right-hand corner of the door with the mallet, hammering away. "Every time my wife has an indiscretion I'm going to add a nail," he said to the door. I couldn't see his expression and couldn't bear to look at Cockie or Ben. "It might be the only way we'll be able to keep track.

Finnegans Wake, several

If you put frightening things into a picture then they can't harm you. If fact, you end becoming quite fond of them.

Sure, society understands visible shackles-- they get the symbolism of the wheelchair, of prosthetics, of a bumper sticker reading disabled veteran, but they still struggle for comprehension of the profound, invisible shackles that an illness such as [Chronic Fatigue] puts on a person's body.

Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true

War is a kind of superstition, the pageantry of arms and badges corrupts the imagination of men.

The Egyptians had a particularly nasty way of getting rid of people they felt had no consequence. Instead of embalming them, they simply constructed a fake mummy made from old strips of linen wrapped around a dummy of mud. If, in our modern world, you feel that there are a lot of "mud mummies" around you, get rid of the mud.

Myths are not to be despised, but reading them literally is not to be recommended.

A cormorant broke the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dreams and life.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this: The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

Forty is a go-to number symbolizing a complete or "right" period of time, and "480" is twelve times forty—twelve likely symbolizing the twelve tribes of Israel. The number is symbolic. It draws on ancient conventions of the symbolic value of round numbers to mark off a sacred moment.

read, and his last book was Balzac's mysterious tale of the magical shrinking skin, La Peau de chagrin.