Quotes About Symbolism

The Bible's was an unlikely, movie-set world alongside our world. Light-shot and translucent in the pallid Sunday-school watercolors on the walls, stormy and opaque in the dense and staggering texts they read us placidly, sweet-mouthed and earnest, week after week, this world interleaved our waking world like dream. The

English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.

The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets threewise silverflamed

She also bit off a little toe from the child's left foot to establish a mark of his identity.

A host of scorpions crawl out from under the wetnurse's dress and start swarming in her vagina which swells and splits, becomes transparent and shimmers like the sun

Usted cree que el mundo entero es metáfora de algo?

The blood of a goat will shatter a diamond.

It'll be symbolic. Let the women dress the way savages dress everywhere—bedeck themselves in old dead parts of birds and animals, smear their faces with colored clay, mash flowers over themselves to conceal their natural stench. The same way they always dress. Now, for Chrissake!

On those pieces of paper there was just the word "Free" and a scrawl that looked like "Jack." So these new freemen and their children for all the years after were called Freejacks.

The thought of a ring around my finger always made me feel tied tight, because rings had no openings to get out of.

especially the short story "The Lottery," which caused a sensation when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948 and has been widely anthologized, to the terror of countless schoolchildren since

Sosil said a cat licking herself meant a guest was coming.

Words and magic were in the beginning one and the same thing, and even today words retain much of their magical power.

Places are often treated like persons.

Dreams are never concerned with trivia.

The dream has a very striking way of dealing with the category of opposites and contradictions . This is simply disregarded. To the dream 'No' does not seem to exist. In particular, it prefers to draw opposites together into a unity or to represent them as one. Indeed, it also takes the liberty of representing some random element by its wished-for opposite, so that at first one cannot tell which of the possible poles is meant positively or negatively in the dream-thoughts.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

The dream shows how recollections of one's everyday life can be worked into a structure where one person can be substituted for another, where unacknowledged feelings like envy and guilt can find expression, where ideas can be linked by verbal similarities, and where the laws of logic can be suspended.

The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.

The dream has no way at all of expressing the alternative 'either … or'. It usually takes up the two options into one context as if they had equal rights.

I always find the same principles confirmed: the elements formed into the dream are drawn from the entire mass of the dream-thoughts, and in its relation to the dream-thoughts each one of the elements seems to be determined many times over.

The waking life never repeats itself with its trials and joys, its pleasures and pains, but, on the contrary, the dream aims to relieve us of these. Even when our whole mind is filled with one subject, when profound sorrow has torn our hearts or when a task has claimed the whole power of our mentality, the dream either gives us something entirely strange, or it takes for its combinations only a few elements from reality, or it only enters into the strain of our mood and symbolises reality.

Dream disfigurement, then, turns out in reality to be an act of the censor.

The first thing the investigator comes to understand in comparing the dream-content with the dream-thoughts is that work of condensation has been carried out here on a grand scale.