Symbols Quotes - Page 24

• 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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• Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes — I mean the universe — but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols, in which it is written.

  Galileo Galilei

  Philosophy, Lying, Book

  "The Assayer". Book by Galileo Galilei, 1623.

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• There's a lot youdon't know, Sam. There's a lot I don't tell you. I know who I am. I know what I do, and what I am to this place.I know what I am to you, and how much you depend on me.You may be the symbol, and you may be the one everyone turns to when something goes bad, and you're the big badass, but I'm the guy doing the day-in, day-out work of running things. So I don't make this about me.

  Michael Grant

  Running, Fear, Badass

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• That’s what i love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff were your not sure what the poets talking about. You may have an idea, but you cant be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings. Is it a stand-in ―a symbol for another idea? Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor? ...I hated poetry until someone showed me how to appreciate it. He told me to see poetry as a puzzle. Its up to the reader to decipher the code, or the words, based on everything they know about life and emotions.

  Jay Asher

  Talking, Ideas, Appreciate

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• A status symbol is a book. A very easy book to read is The Catcher in the Rye. Walk around with that under your arm, kids. That is status.

  Vivienne Westwood

  Book, Kids, Arms

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• When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-piled books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; 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; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

  John Keats

  Book, Night, Thinking

  'When I have fears that I may cease to be' (written 1818)

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• It is war now, and armies need symbols.

  Lauren Oliver

  War, Army, Needs

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• A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Spring, Book, World

  Jorge Luis Borges, Calin Andrei Mihailescu (2002). “This Craft of Verse”, p.4, Harvard University Press

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• In a painful time of my life I went often to a wooded hillside where May apples grew by the hundreds, and I thought the sourness of their fruit had a symbolism for me. Instead, I was to find both love and happiness soon thereafter. So to me [the May apple] is the mandrake, the love symbol, of the old dealers in plant restoratives.

  Hal Borland

  Symbolism, Apples, Happiness And Love

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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• We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.

  Aldous Huxley

  Hands, Solitude, Feelings

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.10, Harper Collins

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• The most obscene symbol in human history is the Cross; yet in its ugliness it remains the most eloquent testimony to human dignity.

  R. C. Sproul

  Dignity, Crosses, Testimony

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• Listen and learn: you need fourteen characters, minimum. Use random letters, not words. Here’s a tip: think of a sentence, and use the first letter in each of those words. Mix it up between upper and lower case. Then pick two numbers that mean something to you – not dates – and stick them somewhere between the letters. Put a punctuation mark at the beginning of the password and then a symbol, like a dollar sign, at the end.

  Julie James

  Character, Mean, Thinking

  Julie James (2012). “About That Night”, p.126, Penguin

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• Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Love Is, Essence

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• She began to be reassured by these pains, tangible symbols of her success in becoming thinner than anyone else. Her only identity was being "the skinniest." She had to feel it.

  Steven Levenkron

  Pain, Anorexia, Eating Disorder

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• Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is a common root of predujice.

  Dan Brown

  Roots, Culture, Common

  Dan Brown (2010). “The Lost Symbol Illustrated edition”, p.345, Random House

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• I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again. If by chance it is not night.

  Pascal Mercier

  Night, Tunnels, Chance

  Pascal Mercier (2009). “Night Train To Lisbon”, p.184, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power.

  Susan Abulhawa

  War, Boys, Leader

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