#symbolism

The assignment of meanings [in music] is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking. The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with affect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge, its whole knowledge of emotional and organic experience, of vital impulse, balance, conflict, the ways of living and dying and feeling. ↗

— Susanne K. Langer

#music #philosophy #symbolism #art

I knew that meant we were done and that we'd smooth over the surface I'd just tossed a rock into, but even the waves that crash down on the beach start out as tiny ripples, far out at sea. They just gain strength over time. ↗

— Jessi Kirby

#issues #moonglass #symbolism #communication

Black is the color of night. White is the true color of death ↗

— Melissa de la Cruz

#symbolism #death

I once saw many flowers blooming Upon my way, in indolence I scorned to pick them in my going And passed in proud indifference. Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me; Now, when I'm sick to death in pain, In mocking torment still they haunt me, Those fragrant blooms of my disdain. ↗

— Heinrich Heine

#flowers #illness #poetry #symbolism #death

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. ↗

— Asti Hustvedt

#bourgeois #decadence #decadent #deviant #literature-decay

The ocean is a central image. It is the symbolism of a great journey. ↗

— Enya

#great #image #journey #ocean #symbolism

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists. ↗

— Gene Tierney

#exists #important #life #none #often

When liberals finally grasped the strength of popular feeling about the family, they cried to appropriate the rhetoric and symbolism of family values for their own purposes. ↗

— Christopher Lasch

#appropriate #cried #family #family values #feeling

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy. ↗

— Maurice Ravel

#always #debussy #different #direction #followed

It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones. It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break -- these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward? ↗

— Laurie Halse Anderson

#scarlet-letter #symbolism #poor