Quotes About Signifiers

#1. The thing that turned out to be interesting about CB radios was the ability to call out in the world with anonymity. You choose your handle. Race and class become non-signifiers.

Rashid Johnson

#2. For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.

Walker Percy

#3. Art has to be incredibly layered. Symbols, signifiers ... layers that relate. Combine signifiers with more abstract notions. Push! Vary lines.

Kay WalkingStick

#4. I never quite understand the way society decides who is beautiful and who is not. But an open face and a capacity for kindness always feel like reliable signifiers to me. actress TILDA SWINTON

Anonymous

#5. The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary ...

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#6. Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.

Kim Gordon

#7. The poem is a structure of signifiers which absorbs and reconstitutes the signified.

Jonathan Culler

#8. What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted.

David Lodge

#9. Though I thought there weren't any words any more, only fucking signifiers. And since texts have no objective univocal meaning, I feel sure that when I call you a bunch of moronic cunts you will be able to decode that sequence of sequential signifiers with the appropriate emancipated subjectivity.

Jonathan Lynn

#10. I use images as signifiers that point to layers of history, lost communities or a latent collective whispering within a certain context.

Shimon Attie

#11. For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do, they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.

John Updike

#12. The clothes in themselves are empty. But what they throw off and what clothes mean as signifiers is incredibly interesting - to see what people do with it. That's more interesting to me than flipping through a magazine or seeing the fall look.

Kim Gordon

#13. The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.

Roman Jakobson

#14. The SF genre, of course, is really an organically evolved, marketplace-determined, idiosyncratic grab bag of themes and signifiers and characters and icons and gadgets, some of which hew to the realistic parameters and paradigms embraced by science, others of which partake more of fantasy and magic.

Paul Di Filippo

#15. Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

Jacques Lacan

#16. Even a cow creates ambiguous signifiers. The moo of mystery.

Mason Cooley

#17. The signifieds butt-heads with the signifiers
and we all fall down slackjawed to marvel at words
while across the sky sheet impossible birds
in a steady illiterate movement homewards.

Joanna Newsom

#18. I took his eating habits and gourmet knowledge as signifiers for other cultural and economic characteristics.

Eve Turow

#19. Everything he's learned about the Civil Service tells him that having tea poured for you is one of the ferociously guarded signifiers of rank, like the grade of paintings from the Government Art Collection hung on your office wall, or the quality of your carpet.

Charles Stross

#20. People respect me; I respect them. I'll never change. I realize who I am.

Michael Vick

#21. A man who reads will find himself.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#22. Look, Haley's comet!

Philip K. Dick

#23. Big egos have little ears.

Robert Schuller

#24. Even though jeans suit me, I never wear jeans.

Carine Roitfeld

#25. Some people might think that the paintings are involved with a mythic - not just subject matter - but a certain sort of physical space that the paintings occupy ... like personages.

Julian Schnabel

#26. No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.

Paul De Man