Evocation Quotes & Sayings

Studying the universe engages us in something bigger than ourselves. Science tries to describe, in terms we can only grasp intuitively, things that are beyond our intuition ... all we can hope for is that our physical descriptions, like a song or a good painting, are a faithful evocation of some ineffable truth. — Guy Consolmagno

The real functional "machinery" of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, organized into larger units or "maps". These maps, continually conversing in everchanging, unimaginably complex, but always meaningful patterns, may change in minutes or seconds. One is reminded of C. S. Sherrington's poetic evocation of the brain as "an enchanted loom", where "millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns". — Oliver Sacks

THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig's glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna's golden age, in which he grew up and flourished. — Ronald Harwood

What makes Travels with Charley so readily accessible to even the most casual reader is the deft evocation of the natural world, the colors and textures of leaves on the trees, the rich smells of earth, the slur of rain on pavement, the sharp rays of the sun as they pillar through a scud of clouds. Indeed, one can hardly open a page of this book without stumbling upon some bright image from nature. — John Steinbeck

McIntyre's tale may have predecessors, but it is unique. I strain for literary comparisons and think: Kipling, the classical Chinese poets, early Patrick O'Brian, Hopkins. I search for a definition of its animating presence: the predator, the Buddhist sage, the hunter. All fall short. I stand before The Snow Leopard's Tale in awe and with a little envy. It is a gem, an uncanny evocation of the cold ancient dusty highlands of Central Asia, and could only have come from Tom McIntyre. It is his best. — Stephen J. Bodio

Adrianne Harun's dark, mysterious novel is by turns Gothic and grittily realistic, astute and poetic in its evocation of evil everywhere. — Andrea Barrett

I found a deep kinship between Mahler's recurrent attempts to confront all sides of life and to affirm himself in the face of his own finitude, and Aschenbach's dedication to persevere in the literary evocation of beauty. Exploring this kinship led me to reflect on many of Mahler's songs and symphonies - and particularly his great masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde. The end result was a way of reading Mann that I hadn't originally anticipated at all. — Philip Kitcher

For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness. — Kathleen Raine

The Grimm brothers always said that their informants were women, which is possibly not true, women of the people. There is the constant evocation of women's voices, in the collecting and arrangement of these stories, and yet the message of so many of them is incredibly misogynist. I was very puzzled by that, and that book explores that contradiction. — Marina Warner

I have always said that archival images are images without imagination. They petrify thought and kill any power of evocation. — Claude Lanzmann

The problem of criticism is not judgment but evocation - conveying the particular emotional and visual feel that the movie has. — David Denby

It, one suspects, must have had much to do with the evocation of what is called the Oxford spirit - that gentlest spirit, so lingering and searching, so dear to them who as youths were brought into ken of it, so exasperating to them who were not. Yes, certainly, it is this mild, miasmal air, not less than the grey beauty and gravity of the buildings, that has helped Oxford to produce, and foster eternally, her peculiar race of artist-scholars, scholar-artists. The — Max Beerbohm

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight ...
[Breadmaking is] one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with one of the world's sweetest smells ... there is no chiropractic treatment, no Yoga exercise, no hour of
meditation in a music-throbbing chapel. that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread. — Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher

The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose ... With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute
reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures. — Gail Caldwell

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication. Its potency often lies in what it does not say. — Isobelle Carmody

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. — Alan Moore

All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality . — Joseph Conrad

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block. — Martin Amis

In A Life In Books, author and graphic design visionary Warren Lehrer crafts a vivid kaleidoscopic odyssey that frames one man's life through not one, but one hundred different books - and book jackets ... An unmistakably modern evocation of the illuminated manuscript. — Jessica Helfand

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation. — Elizabeth Bowen

The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in.

It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation - the tools of the poet. — Tony Hendra

Dreadful is a poignant biography of a forgotten man who drank himself to death. It's a brilliant evocation of a self-hating gay novelist in the 1940s whom Gore Vidal once considered a rival. — Edmund White

The poem is always the last resort. In it the poet makes a world in little, and finds peace, even though, under complete focused emotion, the evocation be far more bitter than reality, or far more lovely. — Louise Bogan

I can't remember coming across a more precise evocation of innocence lost since Golding's The Lord of the Flies. With The Death of Sweet Mister, Daniel Woodrell has written his masterpiece-spare, dark, and incandescently beautiful. It broke my heart. — Dennis Lehane

There is nothing like wine for conjuring up feelings of contentment and goodwill. It is less of a drink than an experience, an evocation, a spirit. It produces sensations that defy description. — Thomas Conklin

In every evocation of a childhood scene, my stepfather's face is the least detailed, the most out of focus; when I think of him my memory's eyes have cataracts. (p. 12) — Rabih Alameddine

The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically. — Bruno Dumont

Hexapodia as the key insight ... I haven't had a chance to see the famous video from Straumli Realm, except as an evocation. (My only gateway onto the Net is very expensive.) Is it true that humans have six legs? — Vernor Vinge

A lavish colored evocation of Hollywood now gone, as shown through an afternoon in the milieu of the 1920's film star. — Kenneth Anger

Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice. — Asti Hustvedt

The essence of any magical working is a complete evocation. It Is more important to experience total emotional response to one's environment than all the "occult" knowledge in the world. How pitifully few are capable of a strong evocation! The most wonderful thing of all is the ability to enter another dimension - another realm of being - and feel the wholeness of that other realm to the exclusion of all other environments. — Anonymous

Seduction is, first and foremost, an art form. And seduction should not always be treated as a wild celebration. In fact, it's more of an evocation of what you do. It's more an evocation of seduction. — Karl Lagerfeld

The setting, concerns, and mood of The Woodlanders are consonant with the Wessex of the earlier novels. There is an element of nostalgia in Hardy's treatment of the woodlands of Little Hintock. Although such rural economies were very much alive in Hardy's day, he strikes an elegiac note in his evocation of a world that will inevitably pass away. However, the woodlands do not form the backdrop to an idyllic pastoral of humanity living in tranquil harmony with nature. The trees, which are such a dominant presence in the novel, compete with each other for nourishment and light, are vulnerable to disease and damage, and are frightening in their moaning under the lash of the storm. The woodlands represent the Darwinian struggle for existence that Hardy sees as extending not only to the inhabitants of this little world but also beyond ... — Geoffrey Harvey

What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself ... never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because ... the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind ... but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

It's not a real place, or a place that you can stay for long; it's a somewhere-over-the-rainbow archetype but rooted in genuine emotions. No matter what Guests' care might be, when they step onto Main Street they enter an evocation of the ideal home town. This is, in a sense, the 'home' to which Dorothy Gale wanted to return. Main Street welcomes all Guests with warmth as comforting today as it was to the post-war society of the 1950's for which it was originally created. — Leslie Le Mon

In a large sense, Main Street is the American origin story. It's an evocation of the American creation tale, and the kick is that the American origin story is a never-ending one, a perpetual tale of creation and re-creation, an eternal now. — Leslie Le Mon

And perhaps, Mrs. Morgan on Lanypwll Farm put all this much better in the speech of symbolism, when she murmured about the children of the pool. For if there is a landscape of sadness, there is certainly also a landscape of a horror of darkness and evil; and that black and oily depth, overshadowed with twisted woods, with its growth of foul weeds and its dead trees and leprous boughs, was assuredly potent in terror. To Roberts, it was a strong drug, a drug of evocation; the black deep without calling to the black deep within, and summoning the inhabitant thereof to come forth. — Arthur Machen

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy — Hisham Matar

The tension of a mysterious danger is even more unbearable than danger itself. People hate the vacuum of an unknown situation. They want security. They even prefer war to the insecure expectation of a war with its threat of enemy surprise. This vague fearful expectation acts on their fantasies. They anticipate all kinds of mysterious dangers; they begin to provoke them. It is the evocation of fear and danger in order to escape the tension of insecurity. — Joost Meerloo

She had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Every Day Is for the Thief is a vivid, episodic evocation of the truism that you can't go home again; but that doesn't mean you're not free to try. A return to his native Nigeria plunges Cole's charming narrator into a tempest of chaos, contradiction, and kinship in a place both endearingly familiar and unnervingly strange. The result is a tale that engages and disturbs. — Billy Collins

The river, tonally, does not recede, presenting the same lifeless grey near and far, a depthless plane upon which Schmitt's dragging oars inscribe parallel lines and Eakins' oars, rising and falling, leave methodically spaced patches of disturbed water. The canvas is haunting - en evocation of the democracy's idyllic, isolating spaciousness, present even in the midst of a great Eastern city. — John Updike

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood. — Freya Stark