allegory

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mockThe meat it feeds on.

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

What does _loa mean?__e narrowed his gaze, answered her literally. __t__ the name of an angel.__enelope tilted her head, thinking. ____e never heard of him.___ou wouldn__ have.___as he a fallen angel?___he was, yes._ He hesitated, not wanting to tell her the story, but unable to stop himself. __ucifer tricked her into falling from heaven.___ricked her how?__e met her gaze. __he fell in love with him.__enelope__ eyes widened. __id he love h

I could end this with a moral,as if this were a fable about animals,though no fables are really about animals.

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

When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.

Comparisons are like rigid fingers__ager to point at a subject but unwilling to grasp it.

...Tolstoy said, happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story - then what does that make us?...

It's terrible to have to fear that your powers will activate at any given moment. Especially when you draw close to people... and find that your only choice is to pull away. It's overwhelming when you find a time, a person, with which there's nothing to fear.

You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it'll become too small.""Then what?" I ask."Well, then you'll have to find a larger shell to live in."I consider this for a moment. "What if it's too small but you still want to live there?"She sighs. "Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you'll either have to be brave and find a new home or you'll have to live inside a broken shell.

Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.

A Lie is something like the truth, but the truth is not like a Lie.

He was no god, just an artist; and when an artist is a man, he needs a woman to create like a god.

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time -- to start thinking in terms of projects.