Quotes about Imagery

I think of the Jewish novelist Chaim Potok, whose artistic hero Asher Lev searches for imagery to express the pain of modern Judaism. The only thing he can find that will do—to the predictable horror of his community—is the crucifixion scene, which he paints in fresh and shocking ways. I think of the way in which the first Harry Potter novel ends with the disclosure that Harry had been rescued, as a young child, by the loving self-sacrifice of his mother. We could go on.

We have also seen that it is easy to mistake literary representation (the use of vivid imagery to denote space-time reality and connote its theological significance) for metaphysical representation (whereby a 'spiritual' or 'transcendent' being is the heavenly counterpart of an earthly reality); and that in this confusion it is all too easy to imagine that language which, in a culture other than our own, would be recognized as highly figurative, is flatly literal.

They also had thoraxes like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the roar of many horses and chariots rushing into battle.

My daddy's face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche, his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees. His skin takes on the pale cheerless yellow of winter sun; for a jaw he has the edges of a snowbound field dotted with stubble; his high forehead is the frozen sweep of the Erie.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.

Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising, especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us believe almost anything—even that smoking cigarettes is cool.

The Bible... provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation.

In every cloud, in every tree — filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women — my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.