In Fiction
In A Hat Full of Sky, a Discworld novel for young adults by Terry Pratchett, an exaggerated form of the doctrine of signatures results in many plants being equipped with a text in tiny letters (and bad spelling) explaining what they may be good for, and sometimes including warnings similar to modern labels on drug or food items. The main character, Tiffany Aching, questions the usefulness of the text on a walnut shell: "may contain NUT". While this is a very minor theme in the novel, Pratchett discusses the actual historical belief in his afterword. The phrase "signatures of all things" appears in the beginning of episode 3 in James Joyce's novel Ulysses. The character Stephen Dedalus walking along the beach, thinking to himself "Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot."
Read more about this topic: Doctrine Of Signatures
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)