symbols Quotes

“Never forget, the words are not the reality, only reality is reality; picture symbols are the idea, words are confusion.”

“It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.”

“The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

“The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.”

“Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over his eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.”

“The glass held the final laugh...”

“The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity.”

“However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.”

“Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a plate with a slice of marble-cake on it she spoke to him. ‘That would be acceptable,’ she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air.”

″‘Symbols have power, Prince,’ Aedion said, pinning him with a stare. Celaena’s stare—unyielding and alive with challenge. ‘You’d be surprised by the power this still wields in the North—what it does to convince people not to pursue foolhardy plans.‘”

All art is at once surface and symbol.