A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak or weep, still they project those signals of signification we instantly recognize as language.

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg: she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver.

Among the monsters, I am well hidden; who looks for a leaf in a forest?

we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, ... however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms.