Citations in Works of Literature:

Mark Doty, Speaking in Figures

You could say that all language is metaphoric, since the word stands for the thing itself, something the word is not. In her evocative memoir, The Names of Things, Susan Brind Morrow points to the origins of letters in the observation of nature…To use words at all is to use them figuratively; we breathe metaphor, we swim in metaphor, we traffic in metaphor…

Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden, deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles until the light bursts through in an unexpected color. The word carries the living thing, concealed, across millennia.

~Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things

Campbell McGrath, Nights on Planet Earth

Heaven was originally precisely that: the starry sky, dating back to the earliest Egyptian texts… The Greek Elysian fields derive from the same celestial topography: the Egyptian “Field of Rushes,” the eastern stars at dawn where the soul goes to be purified. That there is another, mirror world, a world of light, and that this world is simply the sky—and a step further, the breath of the sky, the weather, the very air—is a formative belief of great antiquity that has continued to the present day with the godhead becoming brightness itself: dios/theos (Greek); deus/divine/Diana (Latin); devas (Sanskrit); daha (Arabic); day (English).

~Susan Brind Morrow, Wolves and Honey

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