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Link Quote Stars Tags Author
3dc4a48 "White for Shadowhunters is the color of funerals," Luke explained. " But for mundanes, Jace, it' s the color of weddings. Brides wear white to symbolize their purity." "I thought Jocelyn said her dress wasn't white," Simon said. "Well," said Jace, "I suppose that ship has sailed." Luke choked on his coffee." luke-garroway jace-lightwood symbolism Cassandra Clare
5a4c49f Black is the color of night. White is the true color of death symbolism Melissa de la Cruz
0a6d35e We're actors -- we're the opposite of people! theatre people humanity humor archetypes symbolism Tom Stoppard
f592be1 It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones. It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break -- these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward? scarlet-letter symbolism Laurie Halse Anderson
5fff9f4 Every Valentine's Day, the student council sponsered a holiday fundraiser by selling roses that would be delievered in class. The roses came in four colors:white, yellow, red, pink, and the subtleties of thier meaning were parsed and analyzed by the female population to no end. Mimi had always understood it thus:white for love, yellow for friendship, red for passion, and pink for a secret crush. symbolism Melissa de la Cruz
d99cba2 Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. the-old-man-and-the-sea symbolism Ernest Hemingway
da769b8 Pull a thread here and you'll find it's attached to the rest of the world. literature symbolism Nadeem Aslam
afa77b6 Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes. beauty truth breakfast-of-champions sometimes kurt-vonnegut symbols symbol symbolism Kurt Vonnegut
a2f31be "But is the unicorn a falsehood? It's the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters' snares." "So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it's a fable, an invention of the pagans." "What a disappointment," I said. "I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what's the pleasure of crossing a wood?" religion fables mythology unicorns symbolism Umberto Eco
f41c848 It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.' She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining. war rain symbolism Ernest Hemingway
efe1690 They thought more before nine a.m. than most people thought all month. I remember once declining cherry pie at dinner, and Rand cocked his head and said, 'Ahh! Iconoclast. Disdains the easy, symbolic patriotism.' And when I tried to laugh it off and said, well, I didn't like cherry cobbler either, Marybeth touched Rand's arm: 'Because of the divorce. All those comfort foods, the desserts a family eats together, those are just bad memories for Nick.' It was silly but incredibly sweet, these people spending so much energy trying to figure me out. The answer: I don't like cherries. irony thoughts memories funny over-thinking broken-home cherry-pie the-mind iconoclast psychologist divorce childhood-memories simplicity ironic patriotism logic childhood symbolism psychology Gillian Flynn
c001443 The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words. meaning naval navy symbolism Patrick O'Brian
8d8b7dc "Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought." parents revelation symbolism Jonathan Franzen
aeade7d It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. entities hints tangible whispers illusions perspective sight vision symbolism H.P. Lovecraft
69f91a6 The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind blows some of them back on me. hope giovanni-s-room james-baldwin last-lines sad symbolism James Baldwin
b174e19 DYER. (Sits down) There was nothing that I recall save that the Sunne was a Round flat shining Disc and the Thunder was a Noise from a Drum or a Pan. VANNBRUGGHE. (Aside) What a Child is this! (To Dyer) These are only our Devices, and are like the Paint of our Painted Age. DYER. But in Meditation the Sunne is a vast and glorious Body, and Thunder is the most forcible and terrible Phaenomenon: it is not to be mocked, for the highest Passion is Terrour. plays thunder sun symbolism Peter Ackroyd
d1e88f6 La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles ; L'homme y passe a travers des forets de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers. poetry french-literature french-poetry symbolism charles Baudelaire
a446988 "But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled..."Meters per second" will integrate to "meters." The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall." time symbolism physics Thomas Pynchon
be61374 But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket , the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled...'Meters per second ' will integrate to 'meters.' The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It never did fall. time symbolism physics Thomas Pynchon
2718995 In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the profundity of life is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, common as it may be, that we have before our eyes. It becomes the symbol of it. symbolism Charles Baudelaire
b7abc44 "When I was nineteen years old, I discovered a collection of books in the Harvard library written by Jacob Boehme. Do you know of him?" Naturally she knew of him. She had her own copies of these works in the White Acre library. She had read Boehme, though she never admired him. Jacob Boehme was a sixteenth-century cobbler from Germany who had mystical visions about plants. Many people considered him an early botanist. Alma's mother, on the other hand, had considered him a cesspool of residual medieval superstition. So there was considerable conflict of opinion surrounding Jacob Boehme. The old cobbler had believed in something he called "the signature of all things"- namely, that God had hidden clues for humanity's betterment inside the design of every flower, leaf, fruit, and tree on earth. All the natural world was a divine code, Boehme claimed, containing proof of our Creator's love. That is why so many medicinal plants resembled the diseases they were meant to cure, or the organs they were able to treat. Basil, with its liver-shaped leaves, is the obvious ministration for ailments of the liver. The celandine herb, which produces a yellow sap, can be used to treat the yellow discoloration brought on by jaundice. Walnuts, shaped like brains, are helpful for headaches. Coltsfoot, which grows near cold streams, can cure the coughs and chills brought on by immersion in ice water. 'Polygonum,' with its spattering of blood-red markings on the leaves, cures bleeding wounds of the flesh." jacob-boehme medicinal-herbs medicinal-plants mysticism symbolism Elizabeth Gilbert
97c10a7 Pain speaks louder than words ever could. Like most things it serves as both messenger and a symbol. pain god life-lessons simple-truths symbolism Brandi L. Bates
ce5d336 Traces of the same spiritual concepts and symbolism that enlighten the Egyptian texts are found all around the world among cultures that we can be certain were never in direct contact. Straightforward diffusion from one to the other is therefore not the answer, and 'coincidence' doesn't even begin to account for the level of detail in the similarities. The best explanation, in my view, is that we're looking at a legacy, shared worldwide, passed down from a single, remotely ancient source. cultures contact deep-human-history legacy knowledge symbolism Graham Hancock
4ff4e37 Elsewhere Lankford reiterates that this belief system was by no means confined to the Plains, the Eastern Woodlands, and the Mississippi Valley. It is better understood, he argues, as part of 'a widespread religious pattern' found right across North America and 'more powerful than the tendency towards cultural diversity.' Indeed, what the evidence suggests is the former existence of 'an ancient North American international religion ... a common ethnoastronomy ... and a common mythology. Such a multicultural reality hints provocatively at more common knowledge which lay behind the facade of cultural diversity united by international trade networks. One likely possibility of a conceptual realm in which that common knowledge became focused is mortuary belief [and] ... the symbolism surrounding death. ethnoastronomy origin pattern legacy mythology symbolism Graham Hancock
0278e63 We're in the hands of real magicians here, and real magicians know that with symbols. with the right symbols, with the right questions. they can lead you into initiating yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself... ~Robert Bauval initiation robert-bauval symbolism Graham Hancock
b16e383 (Lyndon) Johnson created his own theater. leadership enthusiasm symbolism Robert A. Caro
f19672e 97. I approached the symbol, with its layers of meaning, but when I touched it, it changed into only a beautiful princess. 98. I threw the beautiful princess headfirst down the mountain to my acquaintances. 99. Who could be relied upon to deal with her. symbolism Donald Barthelme
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