William Blake Quotes

It's into the same bag as E.T. and Yoda, wherein you're trying to create something that people will actually believe, but it's not so much a symbol of the thing, but you're trying to do the thing itself.

Each time I'm starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare... As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.

Oui, dans mon rêve, j'étais un crayon, mais admittedly, I'd more suitably be characterized as a plump carrot.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

As I read more and more fairy tales as an adult, I found massive collusion between their 'subjects' and those in my fiction: childhood, nature, sexuality, transformation. I realized that it wasn't by accident that I was drawn to their narrative structure and motifs.

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

Once, when the days were ages, And the old Earth was young, The high gods and the sages From Nature's golden pages Her open secrets wrung.

The earth has a mouth?” Buckley asked. A big round mouth but with no lips,” my father said. Jack,” my mother said, laughing, “stop it. Do you know I caught him outside growling at the snapdragons?

The Gods are but names for the forces of Nature themselves.

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.

Ravens bring things to people. We're like that. It's our nature. We don't like it.

You know, you can't see or touch and isn't embodied. But they were all fallible, the Gods. And they would kind of rise and fall. You know, they all, like Achilles, Icarus, you know, they all had their high points and their low points.

Now the myths represent the Gods themselves and the goodness of the Gods subject always to the distinction of the speakable and the unspeakable, the revealed and the unrevealed, that which is clear and that which is hidden: since, just as the Gods have made the goods of sense common to all, but those of intellect only to the wise, so the myths state the existence of Gods to all, but who and what they are only to those who can understand.

Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other free for the language of the gods.

This is Buford,” Leo announced. “You name your furniture?” Frank asked.

I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars.

I grew up watching monster movies and horror movies, which I felt were like fairy tales and I think this always spoke to me. Something about that is symbolism - the beauty and the magic which helps me work with film and start making modern fairy tales.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.