Metaphor Quotes

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

~ Ann Zwinger

Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.

~ Richard Kadrey

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.-Vergere

~ Matthew Woodring Stover

Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it's never taking your car out of the garage. It's safe in there, but you'll never go anywhere.

~ Brené Brown

She wore her pain like lingerie, only who loved her enough, got to see it.

~ Himanshu Chhabra

Stretched and skewedTap of the 8-ball and the cueScratches fall throughThey are the scars of you

~ Criss Jami

If a car can represent something, this one represents contradiction. For most of his life, my dad has been able to have any woman he wants. In response, he’s gone through as many as possible, betraying each for someone younger and more absurd. Conversely, for most of his life he’s been able to have any car he wants, too. In response, he’s remained married to this, a 1982 Porsche with a tricky clutch.

~ Matthew Norman

He realized that when he had been afraid to change he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there

~ Spencer Johnson

If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

~ Vera Nazarian

The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.

~ M. Thomas Gammarino

It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Tristan was the soundtrack of my summer. The beat I walked to. The melody I breathed in and out. The lyrics I lived by.

~ Jessica Brody

Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care, so long as it was warm.

~ Thomas Hardy

I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between “genre” and “mainstream” for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth.Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly.

~ Ken Liu

It's a commonly expressed and rather nice, romantic notion that we are all sisters and brot

~ Vera Nazarian

But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I'd be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly.

~ Ruta Sepetys

No more light answers. Let our officersHave note what we purpose. I shall breakThe cause of our expedience to the QueenAnd get her leave to part. For not aloneThe death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,Do strongly speak to us, but the letters tooOf many our contriving friends in RomePetition us at home. Sextus PompeiusHath given the dare to Caesar and commandsThe empire of the sea. Our slippery people,Whose love is never linked to the deserverTill his deserts are past, begin to throwPompey the Great and all his dignitiesUpon his son, who - high in name and power,Higher than both in blood and life - stands upFor the main soldier; whose quality, going on,The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breedingWhich, like the courser's hair, hath yet but lifeAnd not a serpent's poison.

~ William Shakespeare

The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects.

~ Pierre Bourdieu

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world…concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects.

~ Julian Jaynes

She was a mind floating in an ocean of confusion.

~ Caroline B. Cooney

It's a mind, it works by metaphor.

~ Simon J. Townley

I was running and deliberately lost my way. The world far off and nothing but my breath and the very next step and it’s like hypnosis. The feeling of conquering my own aliveness with no task but to keep going, making every way the right away and that’s a metaphor for everything.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

We were as big as the ocean, but as fragile as an ego.

~ Dominic Riccitello

You were a rhyme who mattered, a being who slipped all too often.

~ Dominic Riccitello

I loved you with texture. You loved with a softness. Texture brought detail, softness brought folds. Folds brought creases and creases had secrets.

~ Dominic Riccitello

You were like fine wine, but cheap wine gets you drunk faster.

~ Dominic Riccitello

They leave to test the waters but fail to realize the waters are full of rapids.

~ Dominic Riccitello

My months are spent preparing for the fall.

~ Dominic Riccitello

As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.

~ Antisthenes Pinto

Maybe that was why the French called orgasms “las petites morts”: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

~ Nenia Campbell

The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, “Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear.

~ Ryan Lilly

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

~ Wallace Stevens

I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness.

~ Michael Grant

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe that we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love.

~ Parker J. Palmer

The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn't have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what's commonly referred to as reality.

~ Sol Luckman

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer.

~ Michael Chabon

Butt holes are like a one-way street, they were made the way they were for a reason.

~ Nenia Campbell

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.

~ Brandi L. Bates

I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms.

~ Munia Khan

A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done, cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath, alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed: the same ridge, black and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as meetly my subsequent condition.

~ Charlotte Brontë