The Essential James Hillman: A Blue Fire

To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly, and disguised.

The soul, he says, turns events into experience. But it is image that is experienced, not literalism.

Man is half-angel because he can speak.

“Stick to the image” has become a rule of thumb. This means not translating images into meanings, as though images were allegories or symbols. As he says, if there is a latent dimension to an image, it is its inexhaustibility, its bottomlessness.

But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.

We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people.

A particular image, Hillman notes, is a necessary angel waiting for a response. How we greet this angel will depend on our sensitivity to its reality and presence

the psyche is the subject of our perceptions, the perceiver through fantasy, rather than the object of our perceptions.

as Plato said, soul and idea refer to each other, in that an idea is the “eye of the soul,” opening us through its insight and vision. Therefore