Totem Quotes & Sayings

I love everybody. I think my totem animal is a Labrador Retriever. — Abigail Disney

This sense of the safe-deposit box as a totem of responsible security inspired me to rent a box myself shortly after the birth of our first child ... . — Eric Zorn

The Bumpuses were so low down on the evolutionary totem pole that they weren't even included in Darwin's famous family tree. They had inbred and ingrown and finally emerged from the Kentucky hills like some remnant of Attila the Hung's barbarian horde. Flick said that they had webbed feet and only three toes. It might have been true. — Jean Shepherd

He whisked off her shoes and panties in one movement, wild like an enraged shark. His bulky totem beating a seductive rhythm. Mary's body felt like it was burning, even though the room was properly air-conditioned. They tried all the positions - on top, doggy, and normal.
Exhausted they collapsed onto the recently extended sofa-bed. Then a hell beast ate them. — Garth Marenghi

Atrial fibrillation has been the low man on the totem pole and so we're just trying to get more visibility about this particular disease and how dangerous this could be. — Barry Manilow

I've learned a lot about what kind of actor I want or do not want to be while being on set. I sit back and observe how other actors treat the totem pole of set politics. — Gina Rodriguez

Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks. — Bill Viola

When the East Timor conflict broke out, when they gained independence, the militia killed a lot of East Timorese people. And their sacred totem is the crocodile. They believe that their island is actually a solidified crocodile, so it has sacred status. — Steve Irwin

each variety of humor is a sort of totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off from all the rest of the world. — Hope Mirrlees

One of the most treasured books that I own is Donald Allen's 'The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.' It was a totem of great importance and potency to my group of writer friends in college from 1960 to 1964. — Peter Coyote

I will openly admit that I've never really followed hockey. Given my New England upbringing, I have always adhered to the Celtics, Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins mantra of professional sports fandom, but hockey was definitely the lowest sport on the totem pole - even when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup. — Rachel Nichols

In the religion of the savage one is struck by the presence of two things. First is the performance of rites and ceremonies, the practice of magic or tabu and the worship of fetish or totem. The second thing that is noticeable is that the rites, ceremonies, magic, tabu, totem and fetish are conspicuous by their — M.M. Ninan

The most ancient and important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the totem clan of the opposite sex. — Sigmund Freud

Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless. He can't be used as a totem or fetish in that way. — Terry Eagleton

What an indictment that is, of the Ivy League and its peers: that colleges four levels down on the academic totem pole, enrolling students whose SAT scores are hundreds of points lower than theirs, deliver a better education, in the highest sense of the word, than do those institutions. — William Deresiewicz

I looked at game show hosting as the bottom of the totem pole, one step away from infomercials. I never watched them myself. However, it's been a lot of fun. — Drew Carey

How much living have you done?
From it the patterns that you weave
Are imaged:
Your own life is your totem pole,
Your yard of cloth,
Your living.

How much loving have you done?
How full and free your giving?
For living is but loving
And loving only giving. — Georgia Douglas Johnson

A beautiful woman can be painted as a totem only; not as a woman, but as a Madonna, a queen, a sphinx. — Saul Steinberg

A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans. — Kenneth Anger

Why did Freud write a book about which he had such doubts? We can only conjecture. Peter Gay wrote that "it is highly plausible that some of the impulses guiding Freud's arguments in Totem and Taboo emerged from his hidden life; in some respects the book represents a round in his never finished wrestling bout with Jacob Freud." Gay also mentions that Freud realized he was "publishing scientific fantasies. — Armand M. Nicholi Jr.

We wanted to blast the world free of history.... picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. — Chuck Palahniuk

The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts. — Rudy Rucker

Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It's no better at home. Mom's an anarchopacifist, Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn't fight back. Dad's a Wobbly and wants to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half hour, they yell at each other for two. — Robert Shea

I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the non-plused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand. — Joan Didion

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth's global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of mortality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser's attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who - as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen - was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that mortality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain. — Ronald Carter

Carlos never shied from a mission, and if Mal wanted a howler, there was no alternative but to provide one. There was nothing he could do about it, AP Evil Penchant or not. He knew his place on the totem pole. First things first: a party couldn't be a party without guests. Which meant people. Lots of people. Bodies. Dancing. Talking. Drinking. Eating. — Melissa De La Cruz

In their eyes I must have appeared like some kind of nightmarish totem, a domestic idiot suffering from the irreversible brain damage of a motorway accident and now put out each morning to view the scene of his own cerebral death. — J.G. Ballard

Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord's totem pole, it's very brave of you to invite the "resident atheist" of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you. — Ruth Hurmence Green

When two strangers in a tribal society want to trade, they will often establish trust by appealing to a common god, mythical ancestor or totem animal. — Yuval Noah Harari

With studio work, I'm always the bottom man on the totem pole. — David Lindsay-Abaire

The Haisla named this point Obela. Not so long ago, the bay was lined with longhouses and canoes, totem poles and fishing gear. The reserve was once a winter village, a place to celebrate the sacred season, when memories passed in dance and song and stories from one generation to the next with great feasts called potlatches. — Eden Robinson

Whether you regard it as infantile or as the highest achievement of the European mind, what we find in Kant are the philosophical roots of our modern identification of freedom with choice, where choice is understood as a pure flashing forth of the unconditioned will. This is important for understanding our culture because thus understood, choice serves as the central totem of consumer capitalism, and those who present choices to us appear as handmaidens to our own freedom.
When the choosing will is hermetically sealed off from the fuzzy, hard-to-master contingencies of the empirical world, it becomes more "free" in a sense: free for the kind of neurotic dissociation from reality that opens the door wide for others to leap in on our behalf, and present options that are available to us without the world-disclosing effort of skillful engagement. — Matthew B. Crawford

I had my young eyes opened by the impersonal blood and guts of news photography. I was running the gamut every low man on the totem pole runs - country clubs to mass murder. — Burk Uzzle

Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child's mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Like a wolf, she lived by instinct. — Nikki Rowe

I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie's novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before. — Gloria Steinem

Sarcasm is my sacred totem animal. I swear I wouldn't survive without it. — Anonymous

I lifted my chin, meeting the eyes of the woman who'd become the living embodiment of my totem, my bright phoenix, and forged ahead. "But I live with the wrong choices, the paths untraveled, the lives lost, and I never hold those regrets against anyone but myself. So, if you have some reason that you think I'll regret getting in that car or not getting in that car, then tell me. Because I won't have anything between us, either." My mind flashed to an hourglass, grains of sand trickling away, carrying my life with them. "At least, nothing that we can avoid...like the fear of unspoken words. — Marie Castle

But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan.
Overnight I became a good player.
I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good.
I wanted to live up to the expectations.
I guess that's what it comes down to.
The power of expectations.
And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew. — Sherman Alexie

Doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count. — Ernest Becker

Religions emerged too early in human evolution - they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end. Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We're fascinated by that "other world" where everything is possible. — J.G. Ballard

When people believe that what you believe is what they believe, they turn you into a belief. — Michael Bassey Johnson

You can't really get into regular football after you watch Australian rules football because it's just two different ends of the totem pole. — Andrew Bogut

When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best - which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo. — Christopher Hitchens

You must be absolutely honest and true in the depicting of a totem for meaning is attached to every line. You must be most particular about detail and proportion. — Emily Carr

In America, we have three major sports - baseball, football and basketball. They get the most coverage. Then there's things like golf which mop up most of what is left. But track and field? We are way at the bottom of the totem pole. — Maurice Greene

Freud has said in Totem and Taboo that acts that are illegal for the individual can be justified in another way: the one who initiates the act takes upon himself both the risk and the guilt. The result is truly magic: each member of the group can repeat the act without guilt. They are not responsible, only the leader is. Redl calls this, aptly, "priority magic." But it does something even more than relieve guilt: it actually transforms the fact of murder. This crucial point initiates us directly into the phenomenology of group transformation of the everyday world. If one murders without guilt, and in imitation of the hero who runs the risk, why then it is no longer murder: it is "holy aggression. For the first one it was not." In other words, participation in the group redistills everyday reality and gives it the aura of the sacred-just as, in childhood, play created a heightened reality. — Ernest Becker

The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem. This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course. — Joyce Carol Oates

This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower-class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole. — Michelle Alexander

It's the company itself, but most of these mutual fund companies, the guy who runs the company is just a fact totem and the guy who runs the money is the power. But we really don't know who they are. — Jim Cramer

Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris. — Mason Cooley

To truly understand the Nazis," Ulmstrom said, leading the way, "you have to stop considering them as a political party. They called themselves Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei - the National Socialist German Workers' Party - but in reality, they were really a cult." "A cult?" Gray asked. "They bore all the trappings, ja? A spiritual leader who could not be questioned, disciples who wore matching clothes, rituals and blood oaths performed in secret, and most important of all, the creation of a potent totem to worship. The Hakenkreuz. The Broken Cross, also called the swastika. A symbol to supplant the crucifix and the Star of David." "Hari krishnas on steroids," Monk mumbled. "Do not joke. The Nazis understood the inherent power of ideas. A power greater than any gun or rocket. They used it to subjugate and brainwash an entire nation. — James Rollins

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood. — Denzel Washington

Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional. — Louise Bourgeois

Having grown separately for millennia, the [orginal] Americans were a boundless sea of novel ideas, drea,s, stories, philosophies, religions, ,oralities, discoveries, and all other products of the mind....Here and there we see clues of what might have been. Pacific Northwest Indian artists carved beautiful masks, boxes, bas-relief
S, and totem poles within the dictates of an elaborate aesthetic syste, based on an ovoid shapes that has no name in European languages. — Charles C. Mann

In almost every place where we find totems we also find a law against persons of the same totem having sexual relations with one another and consequently against their marrying. This, then, is 'exogamy', an institution related to totemism. — Sigmund Freud

When I was in London at NBC, I was the lowest man on the totem pole. I would go to diplomatic receptions to meet people. — Leslie Cockburn

If you're so far down the totem pole that someone considers it a favor to you just to have you in their circle (no matter how far outside the ring you are), you should probably cut them out of yours. — Michelle N. Onuorah

Once the principals in their party are seated, with those lower on the totem pole left to grumble and move on to find another table, our once-cozy booth transforms into a damp fusion of vacuous wretchedness, with the three women all complaining alternately about their wet hair/clothes and their respective distance from Talon, while the man himself is trying to maneuver his Paul Bunyan frame way too close to me. — Elle Lothlorien

the simultaneous popping of all the bubbles of joy that have been hidden among the cells of his body. The — Nick Totem

My career has always been one of the most important things, but after having a baby you find that it drops down on the totem pole. — Marion Jones

On 'Buffy' I wasn't all that high on the totem pole as far as responsibility and screen time. — Charisma Carpenter

If you're familiar enough with my body of work, my voice is a familiar totem, in a sense. I guess I have something characteristic in the way that I sing, although I'm not very personally self-conscious about it, so I don't think about it that much. But when I hear the record I can tell it's me. — Todd Rundgren

The butterfly is the totem of transformation and change and a symbol of courage. — Mary Alice Monroe

I was never ready to give up, but I did get words of confidence to move forward from a few musicians that had climbed up the totem pole of rock. They were encouraging words that struck a nerve with me and made me stronger. — Lita Ford

The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it's almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that's going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world. — David Brooks

Some people pray to a totem pole, some people pray to a sun, some people pray to a god. It all works for them. It all comes back to what you think. — Barry Zito

You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem-pole on a crap reservation. — Kingsley Amis

Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole. — Frank Moore Colby

The staff used to say, "When the president eats, everybody eats." That kind of leadership is real. I figured the saying applied to every president but really the saying came from Bush 41's years. He appreciated the lowest on the totem pole because he'd once pounded the Navy pavement. — Gary J. Byrne

What is a totem? It is as a rule an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper, which sends them oracles and, if dangerous to others, recognizes and spares its own children. — Sigmund Freud

Being the lowest one on the totem pole is sometimes the fun part to play. — Stephnie Weir

Animals are not only beholders of great beauty,
but they are also beholders of ancient wisdom. — Molly Friedenfeld

Primitive people alienate themselves in their mana, their totem; civilized people in their individual souls, their egos, their names, their possessions, and their work: here is the first temptation of inauthenticity. — Simone De Beauvoir

And it rained a fever. And it rained a silence. And it rained a sacrifice. And it rained a miracle. And it rained sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. — Tom Robbins

I'm of the age and immaturity level that I cannot give you my respect solely because you are older or ranked higher on an imaginary totem pole. I give you my respect because of your actions. — Erica Goros

I think bullying comes from a person's feeling of self-worth, and so what you do is you find out where you are in a totem pole, and you may slide in somewhere in the middle. So you say, "OK, well there's all these other people who I respect and admire, and there's all these people below me, so I'm going to put on them this sense that they're inferior and I'm going to belittle them, and that's going to raise my stature." — Rib Hillis

The nurse looked surprised. 'You're a bit high on the totem pole to be taking statements.' Carol debated momentarily how to describe her relationship with Tony. 'Colleague' was insufficient, 'landlord' somehow misleading and 'friend' both more and less than the truth. She shrugged. 'He feeds my cat. — Val McDermid

Got any good ideas, soldier?" "Lots of them. Somebody gunned Geiger. Somebody got gunned by Geiger, who ran away. Or it was two other fellows. Or Geiger was running a cult and made blood sacrifices in front of that totem pole. Or he had chicken for dinner and liked to kill his chickens in the front parlor. — Raymond Chandler

It was the greatest stroke of good fortune he had ever encountered in life. In other words, he had finally worked his way up to the lowest spot on the totem pole. — Haruki Murakami

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket. — Sue Monk Kidd

Sometimes. I get recognized, but I'm not really a famous famous. I'm pretty low on the showbiz totem pole - I mean, I'm no Jon or Kate plus eight. I'm just a comic, not a baby factory. — Dave Attell

According to Thomas, the city [of Bath] had once been a veritable hotbed of manifestations, with every sorcerer, bunyip, golem, goblin, pict, pixie, demon, thylacine, gorgon, moron, cult, scum, mummy, rummy, groke, sphinx, minx, muse, flagellant, diva, reaver, weaver, reaper, scabbarder, scabmettler, dwarf, midget, little person, leprechaun, marshwiggle, totem, soothsayer, truthsayer, hatter, hattifattener, imp, panwere, mothman, shaman, flukeman, warlock, morlock, poltergeist, zeitgeist, elemental, banshee, manshee, lycanthrope, lichenthrope, sprite, wight, aufwader, harpy, silkie, kelpie, klepto, specter, mutant, cyborg, balrog, troll, ogre, cat in shoes, dog in a hat, psychic and psychotic seemingly having decided that this was the hot spot to visit. — Daniel O'Malley

When you're that low on the totem pole, you sometimes think you're so unimportant that no one can hear you. — Mindy Kaling

My jobs on campaigns were pretty low on the totem pole - I was an advance man. — Beau Willimon

We invite you, in reading this book, to cast away your preconceptions and enter, with us, a magical world where all things are connected to you, and you are connected to all things. — Sun Bear

He liked the staccato beat of the rain drumming on the roof of the carving shed. — R.J. Harlick

Psychoanalytic investigation of the individual teaches with especial emphasis that god is in every case modelled after the father and that our personal relation to god is dependent upon our relation to our physical, fluctuating and changing with him, and that god at bottom is nothing but an exalted father. — Sigmund Freud

Overnight, I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that's what it comes down to. The power of expectations. pg 181 — Sherman Alexie

Policing. You think you've got it tough. You don't have any idea how it was when I joined the force. The whole cake was divided down to the last crumb. The big boss got seventy percent, and the portions got smaller as you descended the totem pole. And no complaining. You learned to keep your mouth shut at all times - you wouldn't have survived the first week.
You see, what nobody tells you about capitalism is that its warlordism in disguise. That leaves the only job in the jungle worth having an apex feeder - the rest is slavery at various levels of discomfort. Socially, psychologically, we're still in the rain forest. - Colonel Vikorn — John Burdett

My colleague deciphered some bits of the writing on the wolf-totem jar. He found a smattering of words and phrases that spoke of death and destruction. Nothing more."
"So basically a waning label," Painter said.
Kowalski frowned, "Why didn't they just slap it with a skull and crossbones to begin with? It would've saved everyone a bunch of trouble. — James Rollins

I was surprised she'd heard us. When you're that low on the totem pole, you sometimes think you're so unimportant that no one can hear you. My sense of invisibility had made me loose-lipped. — Mindy Kaling

Those who thus seek to screen an idol from criticism only betray their own suspicions about the worthiness of the totem they worship. — Robert M. Price

Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting ... a book that will stay there, a score you can read. — Jerome Robbins

When men and women across the country reported how happy they felt, researchers found that jugglers were happier than others. By and large, the more roles, the greater the happiness. Parents were happier than nonparents, and workers were happier than nonworkers. Married people were much happier than unmarried people. Married people were generally at the top of the emotional totem pole. — Faye J Crosby

In the States, tennis is sixth or seventh on the totem pole as far as sports go. — Andy Roddick

Now defined as art, the totem has lost cult, taboo, and custom. — Mason Cooley

Usually it will be something special or unusual. It may be a stone you have never seen before, or a root with a special shape that has meaning for you. You must learn to understand with your heart and mind, not your eyes and ears; then you will know. But, when the time comes and you find a sign your totem has left you, put it in your amulet. It will bring you luck. — Jean M. Auel