Symbols Quotes - Page 15

• Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

  George Eliot

  Family, Children, Littles

  George Eliot (2016). “Romola”, p.14, George Eliot

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• If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Rainbow, Way, Speak

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• It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

  James Joyce

  Art, Glasses, Servant

  Ulysses (1922)

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• A painting is a symbol for the universe. Inside it, each piece relates to the other. Each piece is only answerable to the rest of that little world. So, probably in the total universe, there is that kind of total harmony, but we get only little tastes of it.

  Corita Kent

  Littles, Taste, Pieces

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• Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood.

  Julian Baggini

  Giving, Events, Arms

  "Why the white cliffs of Dover are so special" by Julian Baggini, www.theguardian.com. August 19, 2012.

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• Of all the foods we share, there is nothing more primordial than meat. It's no surprise that meat-eaters still want a partner who will give, receive and share this primordial symbol of a budding partnership.

  Helen Fisher

  Giving, Meat, Want

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• All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Peril, Beneath The Surface

  Oscar Wilde (2010). “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, p.4, Bibliolis Books

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• I didn't have a chance to buy you anything," she said, then held both closed hands toward him. Uncurled her fingers. In each cupped palm a brown egg. He took them. They were cold. He thought it a tender, wonderful thing to do. She had given him something, the eggs, after all, only a symbol, but they had come from her hands as a gift. To him. It didn't matter that he'd bought them himself at the supermarket the day before. He imagined she understood him, that she had to love him to know that it was the outstreched hands, the giving, that mattered.

  Annie Proulx

  Hands, Eggs, Giving

  "The Shipping News". Book by Annie Proulx, 1993.

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• A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

  Ian Mcewan

  Mean, Feelings, Mind

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Atonement”, p.37, Random House

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• She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn't blow up beautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous symbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to detonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t'aime.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Beautiful, Blow, Paris

  Jeanette Winterson (2013). “Written On The Body”, p.21, Random House

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• It is not given to us to grasp the truth, which is identical with the divine, directly. We perceive it only in reflection, in example and symbol, in singular and related appearances. It meets us as a kind of life which is incomprehensible to us, and yet we cannot free ourselves from the desire to comprehend it.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Reflection, Desire, Example

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• You send me all these roses. Every time I think the last bouquet has arrived, finally, another turns up. I’m running out of vases. I didn’t know roses came in so many colors. You say they’re the perfect symbols of love because they have thorns and love is pain. I say life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something. And you don’t get it. You say you love me, but you don’t speak my language. You don’t even realize I’m an orchid girl.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Girl, Running, Pain

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• Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.

  John Green

  Teacher, Jobs, Book

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• I don't know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination.

  Jodi Picoult

  Past, Woven, Finals

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “Handle with Care: A Novel”, p.80, Simon and Schuster

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• Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.

  Mark Millar

  Dream, Dark, Men

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• WARNING: The following is a transcript of a digital recording. In certain places, the audio quality was poor, so some words and phrases represent the author's best guesses. Where possible, illustrations of important symbols mentioned in the recording have been added. Background noises such as scuffling, hitting, and cursing by the two speakers have not been transcribed The author makes no claims for the authenticity of the recording. It seems impossible that the two young narrators are telling the truth, but you, the reader, must decide for yourself.

  Rick Riordan

  Illustration, Background Noise, Two

  Rick Riordan (2010). “The Kane Chronicles, The, Book One: Red Pyramid”, Hyperion

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• When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance.

  John Keats

  Night, Thinking, Hands

  1818 'When I Have FearsThat I May Cease to Be'.

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• The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Art, Memories, Men

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• The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

  Erin Morgenstern

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Erin Morgenstern (2016). “The Night Circus”, p.27, Random House

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• The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.

  C. S. Lewis

  Links, Graves, Unimaginable

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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• Water can be a symbol of purification, to stand naked before someone a sign of truth, of nothing to hide. - Nick Flynn

  Nick Flynn

  Water, Naked, Purification

  Nick Flynn (2016). “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City”, p.129, Faber & Faber

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• And yes,Percy,of course they are now in our United States. Look at your symbol,the eagle of Zeus. Look at the statue of Prometheus in Rockefeller Center,the Greek facades of our government builidings in Washington. I defy you to find any American city where the Olympians are not proeminently displayed, in multiple places. Like it or not-and believe me,plenty of people weren't very found of Rome,either-America is now the heart of the flame. It is the great power of the West.And so Olympus is here.And we are here.

  Rick Riordan

  Believe, Heart, Cities

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• That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.

  Aldous Huxley

  Reality, Common Sense, Brain

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• Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.

  Robert Benchley

  New York, Children, Central Park

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• Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of roughhewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul.

  Bohumil Hrabal

  Children, Eye, Fire

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