labor as symbol

A favorite device among literary people is to regard nature as a storehouse of symbols. The person who does this does not experience the tree or the pelican as a tree or a pelican, but forces it to labor right away as a symbol.

—Robert Bly, “The old postion,” News of the Universe (Sierra Club Books, 1980)

architectural book

...a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades and domes.

—Viginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own