Never affirm, always allude: allusions are made to test the spirit and probe the heart. — Umberto Eco
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing. — Clifton Fadiman
Illusion is the dust the devil throws in the eyes of the foolish. — Minna Antrim
We used to have more references to things that we pulled out because they almost felt like they were trying too hard to allude to something. — J. J. Abrams
A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations. — Russell Page
Allegories, when well chosen, are like so many tracks of light in a discourse, that make everything about them clear and beautiful. — Joseph Addison
A good simile,--as concise as a king's declaration of love. — Laurence Sterne
It is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. — Jean-Francois Lyotard
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it. — Friedrich Nietzsche
Fine declamation does not consist in flowery periods, delicate allusions of musical cadences, but in a plain, open, loose style, where the periods are long and obvious, where the same thought is often exhibited in several points of view. — Oliver Goldsmith
I had no allusions of radio success. I just loved being in studios. I was having fun and in that sense I now feel a lot like I did when I did that record. — Matthew Sweet
Life has been compared to a race, but the allusion improves by observing, that the most swift are usually the least manageable and the most likely to stray from the course. Great abilities have always been less serviceable to the possessors than moderate ones. — Oliver Goldsmith
I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me. — Agnes Repplier
Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning. — T. S. Eliot
Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye. — Jessica Helfand
The allusion was that I was actually naked. I loved that. It always, kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately. — Nina Simone
Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments. — Alvin Ailey
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. — Samuel Johnson
A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing. — Garrison Keillor
A tragedy can never suffer by delay: a comedy may, because the allusions or the manners represented in it maybe temporary. — Horace Walpole
They still believe in God, the family, angels, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other obsolete stuff. — Isaac Bashevis Singer
Children have no use for psychology. They detest sociology. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff. When a book is boring, they yawn openly. They don't expect their writer to redeem humanity, but leave to adults such childish allusions. — Isaac Bashevis Singer
To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them. — George Steiner
It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade. — Josephine Tey
British conversation is like a game of cricket or a boxing match; personal allusions are forbidden like hitting below the belt, and anyone who loses his temper is disqualified. — Andre Maurois
Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers. — Amy Waldman
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." — Kazuo Ishiguro
The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry. — Kerry James Marshall
I think controversy has this allusion of being controversial but it's totally not, which is why I'm trying to get away from it because it's just easy and automatic. — Bo Burnham
Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions. — Vita Sackville-West
A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail. Index-hunter is a term used mockingly, meaning one who acquires superficial knowledge merely by consulting indexes. The '[holding] the eel of science by the tail' allusion was used in 1728 by Alexander Pope (q.v.). — Tobias Smollett
The absolutely Non-Manifested cannot be designated by any expression which could limit It, Separate It, or include It. In spite of this, every allusion alludes only to Him, every designation designates Him, and He is at the same time the Non-Manifested and the Manifested. — Abdelkader El Djezairi
As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. — Philip Larkin
Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle. — Umberto Eco
There is something underwhelming about scholarly hate mail - the sad literary allusions, the refusal to use contractions. — Brock Clarke
Sound and sound design has always been very important to my approach to film, because it is a more subversive and allusive aspect of the medium. — Larry Fessenden
An allusion has been made to the Homestead Law. I think it worthy of consideration, and that the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefitting his condition. — Abraham Lincoln
The spirit of tanka interests me more than following rigid conventions. As I understand it, the tradition allows a variety of approaches, from simple description and heartfelt expression to classical allusion and evocative wordplay. Succeeding generations rediscover and renew the form so that it retains its vitality. — Harryette Mullen
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds. — Joyce Carol Oates
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions. — Richard Dawkins
[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived. — Orson Welles
Let us now celebrate the literary allusion. — Sherman Alexie
For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative way, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations. — Franz Kafka
He was extremely reticent in his religious sentiments, at least in all that he wrote. Allusions to his belief are rarely, if ever, to be met with in his correspondence. — Daniel Coit Gilman
An accent mark, perhaps, instead of a whole western accent -- a point of punctuation rather than a uniform twang. That is how it should be worn: as a quiet point of character reference, an apt phrase of sartorial allusion -- macho, sotto voce. — Phil Patton
Sir, allusion has been made, in an early stage of this debate, to the history of the excitement which once pervaded a considerable part of the country, in reference to the transportation of the mails on the Lord's day. — Caleb Cushing
When I die Bookchinism comes to an end, and all the allusions to it both among Marxists and anarchists. — Murray Bookchin
When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman? — Laura Mullen
The classical allusions and the Platonic disquisitions on beauty are no longer a form of cover, but integral to Aschenbach's complex sexuality. Moreover, the wandering around Venice in pursuit of Tadzio isn't a prelude to some sexual contact for which Aschenbach is yearning. — Philip Kitcher
tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. And my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it, by writing allusively. — Teju Cole
In Conclusion
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