Quotes About Symbolism

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.

Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.

There are other colors, pink for instance: pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it's used for baby girls. It's a wonder the military hasn't got onto this. Pale-pink helmets, with rosettes, a whole battalion, onto the beachhead, over the top in pink. Now is the time for me to make the switch, I could use a little pink right now.

There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.

We're ankle deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.

A bird of the air will carry the voice.

At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.

Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown. I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire.

There's a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones.

Beads can be used for counting. As in rosaries. But I don't like stones around my neck.

They put the picture in the window when they have something, take it away when they don't. Sign language.

left lipstick imprints the shape of grateful, rubbery sighs...

I planted him in this country like a flag

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them—who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait.

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war.

But I like my stories to be true to life, which means there have to be wolves in them. Wolves in one form or another.

Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because

On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing.

Where there are wars, there will be crows, the carrion-fanciers. And ravens too, the warbirds, the eyeball gourmands. And vultures, the holy birds of yore, old connoisseurs of rot.

A Log Cabin quilt is a thing every young woman should have before marriage, as it means the home; and there is always a red square at the centre, which means the hearth fire.

Canada is built on dead beavers.

a flayed body untangled string by string and hung to the wall, an agonized banner displayed for the same reason flags are.