Imagery Quotes

What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.

~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun;Thyself from thine affectionTakest warmth enough, and from thine eyeAll lesser birds will take their jollity.Up, up, fair bride, and callThy stars from out their several boxes, takeThy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and makeThyself a constellation of them all;And by their blazing signifyThat a great princess falls, but doth not die.Be thou a new star, that to us portendsEnds of much wonder; and be thou those ends.

~ John Donne

I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.But he never liked anyone who--our friends,' said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to marry her.Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day. I was more unhappy than I've ever been since, he thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall. There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.

~ Virginia Woolf

their heart grew coldthey let their wings down

~ Sappho

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

~ Anne Carson

]Sardisoften turning her thoughts here]you like a goddessand in your song most of all she rejoiced.But now she is conspicuous among Lydian womenas sometimes at sunsetthe rosyfingered moonsurpasses all the stars. And her lightstretches over salt seaequally and flowerdeep fields.And the beautiful dew is poured outand roses bloom and frailchervil and flowering sweetclover.But she goes back and forth rememberinggentle Atthis and in longingshe bites her tender mind

~ Sappho

]sing to usthe one with violets in her lap]mostly]goes astray

~ Sappho

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape being blown away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs out of my sleep-starved brain.

~ Jack London

You can't hit it out of the park if you're not at the plate

~ Phillip Gary Smith

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

~ Philip Zaleski

What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! (Give me more images)

~ Erik Pevernagie

[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique.

~ Moderata Fonte

She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.

~ Djuna Barnes

She raises her hands to the sky and breathes it in, she starts spinning, enjoying the feel and energy of this Africa. She floats, her long skirt swaying with the dry grass in the breeze with her spirals, her sandaled feet covered in dust. She is part of Africa. She has never felt so free and happy.

~ Renee Topper

What we saw in Richard Nixon's face was the panic in his soul. – Richard Goodwin

~ David Pietrusza

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

~ Rick Perlstein

He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life.

~ H.w. Brands

The feelings of politicians are rarely transparent.

~ John Ferling

Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Lincoln was a master of small group theatrics.

~ Richard Brookhiser

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Jonathan had been around Washington long enough to know that no offer was exactly what it seemed.

~ Stephen L. Carter

When an image depends on the next for a complete meaning, it moves the story and audience along without choking them with pathos

~ Val Uchendu

All my images are self-portraits, even when I'm not in them.

~ Nuno Roque

Pop is about speaking everybody's language. The imagery and iconography we instantly recognize. When you can rely on things that the public already knows, you're dealing with Pop.

~ Nuno Roque

Watch, how the sunslowly risesfrom behind my earnew lines, new countriesspring up in my palmsmy rough hairbecome swaying silkand all the leavesin my bodybecome lusher than fruits.

~ Sanober Khan

Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But--on the top of that--he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it.

~ Aleister Crowley

...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.

~ Gustave Flaubert

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

~ Ann Zwinger

Night simply drapes itself over the dayAs if someone had lowered a curtain.The sky glitters and moves,Filled with shooting stars and fireflies.

~ Margarita Engle

Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She'd take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free of any dust with a tiny brush, lower the needle ever so gently onto the record. When the record was finished, she'd spray it and wipe it with a felt cloth. Finally she'd return the record to its jacket and its proper place on the shelf. Her father had taught her this procedure, and she followed his instructions with a terribly serious look on her face, her eyes narrowed, her breath held in check. Meanwhile, I was on the sofa, watching her every move. Only when the record was safely back on the shelf did she turn to me and give a little smile. And every time, this thought hit me: It wasn't a record she was handling. It was a fragile soul inside a glass bottle.

~ Haruki Murakami

For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed to become more and more intricately woven, as if to conceal from the listener how eventually it would end. This weaving and re-weaving became so complicated that one wondered how it could possibly be unravelled; and then suddenly one note would resolve the whole problem, and the solution would seem yet more audacious than the procedures which had preceded, called for, and made possible its arrival; when it was heard, all that had gone before took on a new meaning, and the quest, which had seemed arbitrary, was seen to have prepared the way for this undreamed-of solution.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of silver and gold, for instance, there was a clear, unhurried tinkling, as if a djinn with a thousand arms was absent-mindedly practising on a xylophone.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.

~ Paul Bowles

Depression, which lives below the horizon, is the result of painting and entertaining negative imagery - most of which has not taken place in reality. Get up, move, and appreciate that which is given. What is lacking is usually material and heavily influenced by external forces. Don't play yourself, save yourself.

~ T.f. Hodge

Like a dried up spring, magic trickled forth with less and less strength, until one day, the people awoke and there was simply no more to be had.

~ Natalia Marx

She would stay there, flying across the sea like a mermaid with wings, until the end.

~ Natalia Marx

The sun was late, stuck in heavy mist. When it finally broke free there was no one to see, no one to applaud its sterling effort, because everyone in Freemantle was heading west. The burnt orange blaze of dawn made it look like they were fleeing a fire, but all knew that the real conflagration lay ahead.

~ Aaron D'este