The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else; if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.
For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.
And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
When you write a roman a clef, there is a tendency on the part of the reader to wonder how much of this is true, how much invented.
Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.
When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.
Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification.
Occasionally, you'll get a 'District 9,' a film that is politically charged, but there is nothing going on beneath the surface with a lot of horror films. They are not about anything.
Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.
Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
It's their skins I'm peeling," she said. "The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.
As much as "The Lobster" feels like a world we recognize but not the world we live in, it's all drawn in an allegorical way from all the systems that exist.
One of the standard story-generating engines for science fiction is to take something we normally think of as metaphoric and treat it as if it were literal.
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life.
We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.
I trust the symbol that is arrived at in the making of the painting. Meaningful symbols aren't invented as such, they are made or discovered as symbol later.
When you allegorize, you're gonna get everybody saved somehow.
Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
I used the imaginary kingdom not as a sentimentalized fairyland but as an opening wedge to express what I hoped would be some very hard truths.
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.
It'is like a book, I think, this bloomin' world.
Death is imposed only on creatures, not their creations, and has therefore always appeared in art in a broken form: as allegory.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
