Totemic Quotes & Sayings

All art is autobiographical - if it's not, it's not going to quicken on-stage, and it's not going to come alive. — Constantin Stanislavski

Marriage as a long conversation. - When marrying you should ask yourself this question: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into your old age? Everything else in a marriage is transitory, but most of the time that you're together will be devoted to conversation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

They may want to insist that corporations are people but corporations are certainly not Americans. — Jon Stewart

In my deepest, darkest moments, what really got me through was a prayer. Sometimes my prayer was 'Help me.' Sometimes a prayer was 'Thank you.' What I've discovered is that intimate connection and communication with my creator will always get me through because I know my support, my help, is just a prayer away. — Iyanla Vanzant

Faced with a totally controlled, monitored and owned online world, in which every utterance is immediately scanned and filed away, many have yet to make the connection that the best solution may not be running Tor and eighteen proxies, but writing things down on paper and talking face-to-face. Remember the mail? Remember conversations? Yeah, those still exist. Want to shake somebody out of their online trance? Send them a letter. Send them art. Want to record something that will last longer than a few seconds on Facebook or Twitter? Write a book. The physical world didn't go anywhere. In fact, physical artifacts and experiences have only grown in totemic power the more we've pushed them away. — Jason Louv

You only regret the things you haven't done ! — Ian Simpson

These aren't accidents. They are significant choices, like the choice of a totemic animal: something in your spirit aligns with theirs. — Phyllis Rose

Sometimes the beard was loose, sometimes it was braided and sometimes, like that afternoon, it was in its own ponytail so that Al's head looked like something about to be tie-dyed. — Louise Penny

I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb ... — Sylvia Plath

I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-distant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea. — Terence McKenna

If you show off do not get upset when God doesn't show up. — Matshona Dhliwayo

For years and years you enter into samadhi every day in order to attain liberation. Eternity fashions a new self which you find yourself with when you come out of samadhi. Each time you come out a little less, you might say, or your real self comes out a little more — Frederick Lenz

The magnificent lobby of the Chrysler Building - faced with rare marbles, aglitter with decorative metalwork, and surmounted by a ceiling painted with a totemic image of the tower itself - leads to elevator cabs inlaid with exotic woods in fanciful patterns. The entire route from street to office is invested with ceremony, dignity, and delight. — Martin Filler

Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren't sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. — Thomas Frank

Perhaps for totemic reasons, people like to possess a piece of the country they are visiting. Women like to wear it. Men like to eat it. — Mary-Lou Weisman

I'd venture to guess that a list of things you know nothing about could fill volumes. — Heidi Schulz

All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distracting emotion, personality foibles, or less-than-ideal experiences. — Judith Warner

It takes a great reader to make a great book. — Orna Ross

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent. — H.L. Mencken

What I read in her words is a caution. Don't let your anger - especially if it is righteous, especially if you know you're on the side of right - fool you into thinking that it makes you right. Don't be precious about your anger, warns Ahmed. Don't let your anger become a site of oppression - for you, for others- when it can be a site of struggle. Don't let your own experience of anger - feminist, justified, understandable - become totemic. Don't let your anger be a stopping point. — Erin Wunker

I'm used to short distances and short bursts of energy; it was just fastest. — Shannon Miller

Liberals retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian idea that traumatic toilet training is destiny. — Ilana Mercer

I'm much more proud of being a father than being an actor. — Bruce Willis