Literary Analogues
- In Mrs Dalloway, as a plane flew over a shell-shocked soldier, '"So, thought Septimus, they are signalling to me...smoke words"'.
- The author, Virginia Woolf, recorded in a memoir how she herself 'had lain in bed...thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson's azaleas'
- In Margaret Mahy's Memory, the confused adolescent hero decides 'to abandon himself to the magic of chance. From now on his signposts would be words overheard accidentally, graffiti, advertisements, street names...the clues the city offered him'.
- The Naval Intelligence hero of Treason's Harbour reflects ruefully that 'after a while an intelligence-agent tended to see spies everywhere, rather as certain lunatics saw references to themselves in every newspaper'.
- In Vladimir Nabokov's short story, Signs and Symbols, initially published in 1948, the parents of a suicidal youth suffering from a variation of this disease, "Referential Mania", decide to remove him from a hospital in order to keep a more watchful eye.
Read more about this topic: Ideas Of Reference And Delusions Of Reference
Famous quotes containing the words literary and/or analogues:
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“It seems to me that we do not know nearly enough about ourselves; that we do not often enough wonder if our lives, or some events and times in our lives, may not be analogues or metaphors or echoes of evolvements and happenings going on in other people?—or animals?—even forests or oceans or rocks?—in this world of ours or, even, in worlds or dimensions elsewhere.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)