In Fiction
In A Hat Full of Sky, a Discworld novel for young adults by Terry Pratchett, an exaggerated form of the doctrine of signatures results in many plants being equipped with a text in tiny letters (and bad spelling) explaining what they may be good for, and sometimes including warnings similar to modern labels on drug or food items. The main character, Tiffany Aching, questions the usefulness of the text on a walnut shell: "may contain NUT". While this is a very minor theme in the novel, Pratchett discusses the actual historical belief in his afterword. The phrase "signatures of all things" appears in the beginning of episode 3 in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. The character Stephen Dedalus walking along the beach, thinking to himself "Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot."
Read more about this topic: Doctrine Of Signatures
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)