Best 41 quotes in «allusion quotes» category

I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing.

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

When I die Bookchinism comes to an end, and all the allusions to it both among Marxists and anarchists.

Airplane Dream #13' told the story, more or less, of a dream Rosa had had about the end of the world. There were no human beings left but her, and she had found herself flying in a pink seaplane to an island inhabited by sentient lemurs. There seemed to be a lot more to it -- there was a kind of graphic "sound track" constructed around images relating to Peter Tchaikovsky and his works, and of course abundant food imagery -- but this was, as far as Joe could tell, the gist. The story was told entirely through collage, with pictures clipped from magazines and books. There were pictures from anatomy texts, an exploded musculature of the human leg, a pictorial explanation of peristalsis. She had found an old history of India, and many of the lemurs of her dream-apocalypse had the heads and calm, horizontal gazes of Hindu princes and goddesses. A seafood cookbook, rich with color photographs of boiled crustacea and poached whole fish with jellied stares, had been throughly mined. Sometimes she inscribed text across the pictures, none of which made a good deal of sense to him; a few pages consisted almost entirely of her brambly writing, illuminated, as it were, with collage. There were some penciled-in cartoonish marginalia like the creatures found loitering at the edges of pages in medieval books.

Aedus reached into the center console and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. There was hardly a cloud in the sky. He drove for ten minutes before the helicopter came in sight, gradually descending towards the airport in his opposite direction. He looked around for a place to make a U-turn, but there was no legal turn available. Aedus sighed. The things a good guy has to do. He made a turn onto a side road and looped back around, tires squealing. In an action movie he’d just make a U-turn wherever, speed down the road, and weave in and out of traffic. Alas, this wasn’t an action movie and he wasn’t a certain Jason Bour—no time to think about that. The airport was coming up quick and as bustling as ever.

Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people.

By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept.

Clement, usually a fluent speaker in any situation, could hear his voice assuming a pompous and affected tone, not unlike that which many actors use (wrongly in Clement's view) when playing Polonius.

Danny strolled to the town common, sat on one of the benches in Teenytown and took one of the bottles out of the bag, looking down on it like Hamlet with Yorick's skull

Brisbane, if you wish to go about looking like Heathcliff that is your affair.

Earnshaw is quite a famous name, thanks to Miss Brontë . I did not realise there were Earnshaws in this country." Mrs. Earnshaw gave a sharp nod. "Aye. And Heathcliffs and Eyres, as well. Proper little thieves, those Brontë girls.

I don't think you truly realize what it means for the gates of Tyersall Park to be closed to you forever." Nick laughed. "Jacqueline, you sound like some character out of a Trollope novel!

Fangirl rage. It demands to be feared.

It feels like all we've been doing day after day is partying with Shanghai's Gossip Girl crowd.

In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there’s going to be something entirely different… death without remediation.

I scroll through my own stories in my phone, the ones I write when I can't sleep, when I think about her, about what the fuck happened, when I make like Alvy Singer and try to correct it all with my imagination.

It never came down to two roads at all, or if it did, I took the one less traveled by for a driveway, or the entrance to a mall, or it slipped past like a station off the air while I bent down to fiddle with the dial.

Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat's still inside.

Most everything is a knockoff of something else. Once you get the idea, everything you see, read, taste or smell becomes an allusion to it. It's the art of transforming things.

Polly Partial handed me a piece of paper printed on all sides with confusing times and locations. It looked like a herd of numbers having a square dance. I would rather have reread her book [To Kill a Mockingbird] than Stain'd-by-the-Sea's confusing train schedule, but just barely.

Out here, where the sand is so white, so Westernized, how could I not sink into it & burn with questions like what am I doing here I am in the wrong book I am in the wrong era I am not Dorothea I am Analicia

She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.

Pünd remembered their first case together when Fraser had failed to notice that his travelling companion, on the three-fifty train from Paddington, was actually dead.

She crossed her legs and kicked out her feet, clad in thick wool socks and boots big enough to house a little old lady.

So,' I said, partly to Magda, partly to myself, 'Rema left Argentina with this An-a-to-le person.' I adopted the four-syllable pronunciation with confidence, feeling myself an Hercule Poirot: it was near the end of the story, the suspects were in the room.

So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply. You think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn't want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

The notes weren't played," he went on, "They were poured from a Grecian urn.

Suddenly, stupidly, she started singing: "If Adelita went off with another man.

Suzuki Todry sits down next to him [an allusion to this? Now Jenny Diver, ho, ho, yeah, Sukey Tawdry Ooh, Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown Oh, the line forms on the right, babe Now that Macky's back in town — Bertolt Brecht, “Mack the Knife,” 1928]

It was how it had been with the madman among the tombs, that their number was legion, far in excess at any rate if the number listed on the back of the door as the room's maximum occupancy.

It was like a comedy by Shakespeare. All the ends of the story were being bound up in a good way.

What do you think of Poe?" "He's awful. He was obviously . . . what's the term . . . 'disappointed in love' at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he'd probably punch me on the nose." "I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming.

They sold the furniture. There is nothing to sit upon and no table to set, so it is the kitchen for you, my girl. Pretend you are at Wuthering Heights. Everyone there ate in the kitchen.

There it is," he'd say reverentially. "The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make believe.

This then was love, to look and look until one exists no more, this was the love which was the same as death.

What is the dull river Lethe I don't know, but I think it's evil And when I drink of it I don't see stars Instead I see the lime groves

When Louise returned to the Aviary the others were playing the game of what character in fiction Peter Mir reminded them of. 'I think he's Mr Pickwick,' said Louise. 'Oh no! Never!' said Sefton. 'I think he's more like Prospero.' 'I think he's the Green Knight,' said Aleph. 'Come on, Moy, what do you think?' 'I think he's the Minotaur.' 'The Minotaur isn't a literary character, he's a mythical character,' Sefton objected. 'Oh really — !' 'What does Clement think?' said Aleph. 'I think he's Mephistopheles,' said Clement. 'Surely not, he's so nice!' said Louise.

Why so sad?" Zach queries in fairy-tale tones. "Rachel?" "O my brother Ivanushka," she recites. "A heavy stone is round my throat, silken grass grows through my fingers, yellow sand lies on my breast." "That's perishing gloomy," Zach remarks. "It ends happily though. Gracious! Everything sounds depressing this morning," adds Rachel. "There's a teacher at my school, she's very young, but she goes, Gracious! Just like a dowager. Makes me laugh. Except this morning. I can't help it. I am too depressed. I hate those voices so much. In the Gardens." "Stop listening," Zach scolds and put his hands in her hair—silken grass grows through his fingers.

What some people need," said Magrat, to the world in general, "is a bit more heart." "What some people need," said Granny Weatherwax, to the stormy sky, "is a lot more brain." Then she clutched at her hat to stop the wind from blowing it off. What I need, thought Nanny Ogg fervently, is a drink.

Wow," Mira said, looking around, "super fun." "When do they bring out the pig's blood and dump it on the head of the awkward girl with telekinetic powers?" Sebby asked. "Not until ten, I think." "Well, what are we supposed to do until then? This was not well planned.