symbolic transformation Quotes

At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.

I prefer the gradual path My feeling is that mythic forms reveal themselves gradually in the course of your life if you know what they are and how to pay attention to their emergence. My own initiation into the mythic depths of the unconscious has been through the mind, through the books that surround me in this library. I have recognized in my quest all the stages of the hero's journey. I had my calls to adventure, my guides, demons, and illuminations.

Since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excrete it imprinted with ideas.

Every leaf of the tree becomes a page of the book, once the heart is opened and it has learnt to read.

When one starts from a portrait and seeks by successive eliminations to find pure form... one inevitably ends up with an egg.

Magic, then, is not a method, but a language; it is part and parcel of that greater phenomenon, ritual, which is the language of religion. Ritual is a symbolic transformation of experiences that no other medium can adequately express.

…just as Christian came up to the Cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, fell from off his back, and began to tumble down the hill, and so it continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre. There it fell in, and I saw it no more!

Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back.

The act of tattooing one's skin was a tranformative declaration of power, an announcment to the world: I am in control of my own flesh.

The East is going to be pretty easy for me. The Great Chest of the West becomes the Great Beast of the East.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.

The Life Cube Burn is cathartic, fun, exciting, and even reverent. It's a spectacular opportunity to put a sense of finality to the event. And when those thousands of written "wish-sticks" inserted into the Cube from all kinds of people combine with the art and shared messaging from the write boards in a blaze of flame and a column of smoke and ashes, it becomes a communal and very spiritual moment.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

The piety of the Hebrew prophets purges their grossness. The circumcision is an example of the power of poetry to raise the low and offensive.

We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos - the right moment - for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

I question the negative connotations of fabric, of ribbon, of lace. I turn these symbols of our imprisonment around.

Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.

A frog would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle.

I would blossom if I were a rose.