symbols do have a relatively limited range of meanings, but in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing. If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory. Here’s how allegory works: things stand for other things on a one-for-one basis.

And lateral thinking is what we’re really discussing: the way writers can keep their eye on the target, whether it be the plot of the play or the ending of the novel or the argument of the poem, and at the same time bring in a great deal of at least tangentially related material.

we readers sometimes forget how long literary composition can take and how very much lateral thinking can go on in that amount of time.

plot is character in action; character is revealed and shaped by plot.

What he means is that plot, not actions themselves but the way those actions are structured, grows out of the nature of the characters, which we then discover through their actions.

Aristotle suggested an intimate connection between the shape of the plot and the nature of the characters involved. His discussion is sometimes reduced to the formulation, “Plot is character revealed in action.”

There’s nothing like being out on your own to make you intellectually self-reliant.

she had felt that she was missing something in her experience of literature, some deep secret her teachers had known but not imparted to her.

It should be a question mark, though, because what occurs from then on is anybody’s guess.