Totemic Might Quotes & Sayings

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications ... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance. — Henry James

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

My goal is to correct evil. I have to instruct these people on the right path. — Viktor Shel

It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end. — Tadeusz Borowski

Falling in love means your reserve chute didn't work as you hurtled back to earth — Josh Stern

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

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

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

One of the adversary's sharpest tools is to convince us that we are no longer worthy to pray. No matter who you are or what you may have done, you can always pray. — Boyd K. Packer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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