Quotes About Symbolism

Red roses for young lovers. French beans for longstanding relationships

The idea is to have something that represents the deity on your altar. It is about the energy of the item more so than the item itself. The item is a representation of the energy of the gods or goddesses.

There is not a single Indian temple where there is no image of a snake. This is not because this is a culture of serpent worshippers. It signifies that a sacred space holds the possibility of arousing the unmanifest energies in you.

I'm handing them the American passport which signifies the exact opposite of what Islam stands for.

My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my 'X.' The Muslim's 'X' symbolized the true African family name that he could never know. For me, my X replaced the white slavemaster name of 'Little,' which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal fore-bearers. The receipt of my X meant that forever after in the nation of Islam I would be known as Malcolm X.

Mr. Muhammad sent me a typed reply. It had an all but electrical effect upon me to see the signature of the "Messenger of Allah." After he welcomed me into the "true knowledge," he gave me something to think about. The black prisoner, he said, symbolized white society's crime of keeping black men oppressed and deprived and ignorant, and unable to get decent jobs, turning them into criminals.

You could wonder for hours what flowers mean, but for me, they're life itself, in all its happy brilliance. We couldn't do with out flowers. Flowers help you forget life's tragedies.

Words are not the things they name. Saussere says they take distinctive meaning by contrast with other words. A square is a square because it's not a triangle, not a circle.

Stories can be true without being literally and factually true.

I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.

Metaphorical language is intrinsically nonliteral. It simultaneously affirms and negates: x is y, and x is not y. The statement "My love is a red, red rose" affirms that my beloved is a rose even as it negates it. My beloved is not a rose, unless I am literally in love with a flower. Rather, there is something about my beloved that is like a rose.

it has more than one nuance or resonance of meaning. In terms of its Greek roots, "metaphor" means "to carry with," and what metaphor carries or bears is resonances or associations of meaning.

The recognition that the Bible contains both history and metaphor has an immediate implication: the ancient communities that produced the Bible often metaphorized their history. Indeed, this is the way they invested their stories with meaning. But we, especially in the modern period, have often historicized their metaphors.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

Never mind. Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

Strange how we decorate pain. These ribbons, for instance, and the small hard teardrops of blood. Who are they for? Do we think the dead care?

The objects I chose were designed to hold something, but I didn't fill them up. They remained empty. They were little symbolic shrines to thirst.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ; if they didn't kill birds and fish they would have killed us. The animals die that we may live, they are substitute people, hunters in the fall killing the deer, that is Christ also. And we eat them, out of cans or otherwise; we are eaters of death, dead Christ-flesh resurrecting inside us, granting us life. Canned Spam, canned Jesus, even the plants must be Christ.

Point being that you don't have to get too worked up about us, dear educated minds. You don't have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice. That might be too upsetting. Just discard the sordid part. Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money.

Wild geese fly south, creaking like anguished hinges; along the riverbank the candles of the sumacs burn dull red. It's the first week of October. Season of woolen garments taken out of mothballs; of nocturnal mists and dew and slippery front steps, and late-blooming slugs; of snapdragons having one last fling; of those frilly ornamental pink-and-purple cabbages that never used to exist, but are all over everywhere now.

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen.

The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards.