Symbolic Loss Quotes

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

Not idly do the leaves of Lorien fall

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.

I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay.

My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.

The waterfront without the Ferry Tower would be like a birthday cake without a candle.

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.

I claim that in losing the spinning wheel we lost our left lung.

Of course, it gave the studio an enormous power, because I don't know any other place who had that skill with images to communicate with. And the need of these kinds of images are even greater now than they ever were because we are losing our life symbols.

You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember, those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left in the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird's existence than the bird ever was?

With so much to be aware of, awareness bracelets have reverted to signifying nothing more than color itself. Idealism has devolved into fashion.

Kennedy's assassination was the opening salvo in the social revolution of the sixties. In some ways, perhaps, Princess Diana and Mother Teresa dying when they did, and how they did, represent the opening salvos of a social revolution in the nineties.

The deterioration of symbols is natural. They wear out, needing to be reclaimed, recreated; returned to the spirit.