symbolism

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

White is associated with purity because the entire spectrum is functioning in unity. White is a healing color. White is appropriate for weddings because the unity of male and female symbolizes the unity of allness.

...this cryptic game of hide-and-seek is what makes it one of the greatest historical mysteries. So many of the symbols can be interpreted in so many different ways, there's always the possibility that all we're really looking at is a blank slate onto which anything can be read.

The whole purpose of the construction of The Bridge of Silver Wings was to provide a path leading to The River of Winged Dreams, or to serve as a resting place until the river__ deeper and truer nature revealed itself.

The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.

When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don__ matter to you; you don__ bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.

And it's only symbolism puts magic and meaning into anything. You of all people should know that. We can make love amongst the gods, or we can screw on a dirty mattress. It's our choice.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.

She bent and placed a single daisy upon the grave. A simple white daisy. The plainest of flowers, perhaps the purest, Elspeth thought. It had cost next to nothing at all, and perhaps that was the point. She wasn__ being cheap. She was being symbolic. In her mind, Andrea deserved only the unstained purity of the simplest of daisies, a daisy that was unsoiled by a wealth that couldn__ find the money to have claimed her soul.

What is the difference between my view and the classical Christian perspective? I am convinced that there are not multiple comings and multiple returns of Christ, but only one decisive coming at the end of the world, which includes the resurrection, the rapture, and his appearance in the sky!

This is the worst of our ways of remembering--this tendency to prod the crust of anecdote in the hope of releasing a gush of piping-hot symbolism.

Why do writers use symbolism?_ Okay, so let__ say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, __ have a headache!_ and other people are like, __eah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches._ But your headache is not a regular headache, it__ a serious headache, so you say, __y brain is on fire!_ to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That__ a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let__ say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one__ dreams. And you can see the dream but you can__ cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier _ a bay-like barrier, some would say _ that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable_. So I think that__ why.

Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King__ X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have _ I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible _ any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven__ seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish._ David Thomson, In Camden Town

Some people know they'll live until spring and that's all they need to be happy. When I was feeling good, I just let the sun go down, knowing I'd see it again next morning. When I felt worse, and it didn't matter for what reasons, every sunset seemed to me like the end of the world. Maybe it's true, that the world dies every day at evening and is born again in the morning. But not always for everybody.

Behind these eyesthere is a girl trapped withinher pain _ a girl feeling all the emotionsof anger and sadness.She__ fighting for a way out._ (In her eyes, p. 39)

Trees lose their leaves in blizzards like these.

Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.