Jami Attenberg Quotes

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

Symbols are important.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn't.

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

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

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

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

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

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

I don't know a whole lot about symbolism. There seems to me to be a potential danger in symbolism. I feel more comfortable with metaphors and similes.

You grow up trying to interpret, worshipping, visual symbols. It's a body-soaked imagery that you're looking at.

Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.