Chirlane McCray Quotes

Symbols are important.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

It's a little strange to become a kind of symbol of a whole type of analysis.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Words are not pebbles in alien juxtaposition.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

Words are intermediary between thought and things. We express ourselves really not through words, which are only signs, but through what they signify - through things.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.

It is through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works and has his being.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them.

A sign is always less than the thing it points to, and a symbol is always more than we can understand at first sight. Therefore we stop at the sign but go on to the goal it indicates; but we remain with the symbol because it promises more than it reveals.

It ain't what things actually are, it's all they stand for.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

Everything in this world has a hidden meaning.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

Life is like an analogy.