Quotes About Symbolism

Everyday objects shriek aloud.

Just as Diana Prince is never around when Wonder Woman shows up, Venus is either a Morning Star or an Evening Star, never both simultaneously.

Personal measurements provide an opportunity to be wildly creative. If you're doing a spell for mental clarity, find a way to incorporate your head measurement. If your spellwork is aimed at expressing your feelings more clearly, try incorporating the distance from your heart to your mouth. Talismans, charms, garments, and tools: When we personalize these items, we imbue them with powerful ties to our own imaginations, associations, bodies, and beliefs.

To reckon his age he carved numbers in his foot, and his sole ached like a goblet which has never held wine.

las mujeres son como las ranas, que por una que zambulle salen cuatro a flor de agua.

noto que en la pared a mis espaldas una mariposa negra y sucia está dándome una mala noticia que no entiendo.

On Earth, when anthropologists can't find instant meaning in any cultural artifact, they say "This obviously had deep religious significance.")

The first is rarely noticed. John's work is highly unusual in the sheer prolific extent of its visual imagery. It is true that symbolic visions are typical of the genre. But in other apocalypses other forms of revelation are often as important or more important.

This means that "meeting the current toward elimination of names is the counter current of late development, which . . . gave to simplified matter the verisimilitude of proper names.

How symbolic the smallest things can be, the flotsam and jetsam of lives

Why did the sheep bells of the Falkland Islands ring louder than the church bells of Jerusalem?' —

The symbolism of the action has been replaced by the reality of the touch.

In Western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue. This remarkable equation relates to a particular definition of goodness. All lists of the moral connotations of white as symbol in Western culture are the same: purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity. In

A thirty-two-ounce soda and a tank of gas is America distilled to its seminal fluids.

What could be saved, if the Flag of the American Nation were to perish?

Here's the thing about an apple: it sticks in the throat. It's a package deal: lust and understanding. Immortality and death. Sweet pulp with cyanide seeds. It's a bang on the head that births up whole sciences. A golden delicious discord, the kind of gift chucked into a wedding feast that leads to endless war. It's the fruit that keeps the gods alive. The first, worst crime, but a fortunate windfall. Blessed be the time that apple taken was.

He says there's nothing on Earth he can give to her, for their anniversary, to thank her for what she has given him. Nothing, except for a thing that grows.

nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant

Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except in the daily life she leads. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

favorite metaphors. I love the image of fire, not for its seeming destructiveness, but as a natural symbol for transformation—literally, the changing of forms. Farmers, forestry workers, and Native peoples know that fire is a renewing force, even as it also can be destructive. We in the West tend to see it as merely destructive (which is probably why we did not understand the metaphors of hell or purgatory).

Although Jesus was clearly of the masculine gender, the Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does.

There would have to hover above him, like the stars in a full sky, a vast configuration of images and symbols whose magic and power could lift him up and make him live so intensely that the dread of being black and unequal would be forgotten; that even death would not matter, that it would be a victory