How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"To speak is to name names, but to speak is not important. A thing happens once that has never happened before. Seeing it, a man looks upon reality. He cannot tell others what he has seen. Others wish to know, however, so they question him saying 'What is it like, this thing you have seen?' So he tries to tell them." (1.409)
The speech that gets our minds churning on symbols for the rest of the novel. Can words possibly describe reality? Sam says no, but then again, he's using words to describe the reality that they cannot describe reality… Whoa.
Quote #2
"They are our children, by our long-dead First bodies, and second, and third and many after—and so, ours is the parents' responsibility toward them." (2.298)
Although the Firsts fashion themselves as gods, these personas are just symbols meant to represent them as beyond human. In fact, they're so human they are responsible for an entire planet filled with, yeah, humans.
Quote #3
Occasionally, the lamp would flare or sputter, and it was as if a nimbus of holy or unholy light played about their heads, erasing entirely the sense of the event, causing the spectators to feel for a moment that they themselves were the illusion, and that the great-bodied figures of the cyclopean dance were the only real things in the world. (3.22)
All art is symbolic in one way or another. Not to get all Matrix-y, but what happens when you can no longer tell the real world from the art world? What if the world we think is real is really just an elaborate artistic symbol? In fact, Buddhism and Hinduism do have a concept that suggests the illusionary and—dare we say, symbolic—nature of reality, maya.