#symbol

People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You an call her what they call her. ↗

— Marlon James

#blood #color #historical-fiction #metaphor #red

We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give. ↗

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

#physics #science #spirit #symbolism #nature

I'm not playing myself. It's a symbolic situation, where I want to introduce a fascist behind the table. I couldn't have had anybody else do that; for it to be successful, I had to do it myself. ↗

— Mohsen Makhmalbaf

#behind #else #fascist #had #i

Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the complex symbol which is the brand image. ↗

— David Ogilvy

#brand #complex #contribution #every #image

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

— Jacques Lacan

#being #nature #only #symbol #uniqueness

The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not given only on stone over their clay but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other mens lives. ↗

— Pericles

#earth #everywhere #given #heroic #into

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch that is, who should be listened to and when. ↗

— Max de Pree

#cultures #holds #leaders #listened #must

I never think of myself as any kind of sex symbol, but I get letters from all over, all sorts. It's really cool. I get a lot from inmates, which is kind of scary. But the best was the guy who wanted to send me a plane ticket to fly me to his prom. ↗

— Laura Prepon

#best #cool #fly #get #guy

America's veterans and troops serving abroad today fought hard to preserve our red, white and blue, from the Revolutionary War to today's Global War Against Terrorism, and Congress' action today is appropriate for one of our most sacred symbols. ↗

— Bill Shuster

#action #against #america #appropriate #blue

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life. ↗

— Margot Asquith

#life #signposts #symbols