Metaphor Quotes

My fiancé immediately began to look uncomfortable, but did not voice this discomfort except by a soft gurgling sound in the throat . . . The gurgling escalated, but my mother politely switched on the dishwasher, and soon we heard mostly the sound of machinery rather than that of a person's feelings surfacing.

~ Alexandra Kleeman

Running wild in a field of exclamations, chasing question marks

~ Natasha Tsakos

Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.

~ Joe Hill

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.

~ Virginia Woolf

Hatred is as easy as slipping on a well-worn woolen cloak. If only it provided the comfort of one.

~ Nenia Campbell

The nature of atheism merits clarification on two further points which involve less common ideas about theism. The first involves the idea of 'God' which is metaphorical — for example, a theist who believes in 'God' as a principle of conscience or morality. This 'God' exists in a person’s mind and it is not something which atheists will dispute. Atheists agree that gods exist as ideas in people’s minds; the disagreement lies over whether any gods actually exist independently of human beliefs. Those are the gods which atheists disbelieve in or deny.The second type of theism involves gods that exist as physical objects: stones, trees, rivers, or even the universe itself. Believers treat these objects are their gods, but do atheists reject their existence? Of course not — but how do they then remain atheists? The point of disagreement here is whether the label 'god' communicates any information beyond the more common label of 'stone,' 'tree,' or 'universe.' If not, then as far as atheists are concerned, those objects don’t merit the extra label 'god' and they remain atheists.

~ Austin Cline

Her voice was a hushed whisper against my ear. An audible smile.

~ Richard E. Gropp

He holds Willem so close that he can feel muscles from his back to his fingertips come alive, so close that he can feel Willem's heart beating against his, can feel his rib cage against his, and his stomach deflating and inflating with air. 'Harder,' Willem tells him, and he does until his arms grow first fatigued and then numb, until his body is sagging with tiredness, until he feels that he really is falling: first through the mattress, and then the bed frame, and then the floor itself, until he is sinking in slow motion through all the floors of the building, which yield and swallow him like jelly. Down he goes through the fifth floor, where Richard's family is now storing stacks of Moroccan tiles, down through the fourth floor, which is empty, down through Richard and India's apartment, and Richard's studio, and then to the ground floor, and into the pool, and then down and down, farther and farther, past the subway tunnels, past bedrock and silt, through underground lakes and oceans of oil, through layers of fossil and shale, until he is drifting into the fire at the earth's core. And the entire time, Willem is wrapped around him, and as they enter the fire, they aren't burned but melted into one being, their legs and chests and arms and heads fusing into one.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

He didn't really care if they felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

A chill December morning dawned, with rags and tatters of mist hanging on the trees like poor people’s washing.

~ Ken Follett

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

~ Thomas Fuller

But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowledge of the primordial state would be like a lamp, which, when lit in the room, at once causes the darkness to disappear, enlightening everything. In the same way, if one has the presence of the primordial state, one can overcome all hindrances in an instant.

~ Namkhai Norbu

Nowadays films and television are what I like to call Microwave Media. I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes time. Slow, precious, tempered time. A script is a film's recipe. It's just a piece of paper to the novice cook, but even a recipe needs time to be perfected before it's given to the masses.

~ Solange Nicole

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

~ Haruki Murakami

Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.

~ Jeffrey Tayler

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

~ John Updike

The man's emotions flowed back and forth like waves of the sea.

~ Marc Cameron

The statue of Justice, symbol of the law, as she holds aloft her balance scale, is blindfolded. Justice is blind to race, creed, color – and to personal eccentricity. If there were a comparable state of Clio, the Muse of history, she would have to be presented with the blindfold lying at her feet, because the balance of her scales must be weighed with a conscious awareness of the facts and interpretations she must weigh.

~ Leonard J. Arrington

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

~ Walter De La Mare

When people hurt you over and over, think of them like sandpaper. They may scratch and hurt you a bit, but in the end you end up polished and they end up useless.

~ Andy Biersack

Love is like a pane of glass.. It can take harsh beatings from the weather around it... But if it gets hit in the right place it shatters.. And when you try to pick it up... You end up getting cut.

~ Tyler Hoyt

love was never meant to bejust a metaphorbetween the pages of poetry.

~ Sanober Khan

I saw Sonora before me, so otherworldly, so desolate, some cast-out mistress on the pale blue planet, and longed suddenly to stay.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Every human is a school subject. This is rather a metaphorical way of saying it, to put it straight, those you love are few, and the ones you detest are many.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The power of the metaphor is that in a single flash the entire idea is revealed.

~ G.r. Gopinath

That one,” Ferox said, pointing at Johann with a claw. “I can see he’s communicated like that before and I think I can speak to his mind. Let me see.”“After a moment, Johann broke from the line and approached the dragon.“You did ask me to come closer, didn’t you?” he asked.“Yes, I can speak to this one. He can be my rider.

~ Tom Larcombe

And metaphors like cats behind your smile,Each one wound up to purr,each one a pride,Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

~ Ray Bradbury

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

~ Milan Kundera

You're a marshmallow. Soft and sweet and when you get heated up you go all gooey and delicious.-

~ Janet Evanovich

Comparisons are like rigid fingers—eager to point at a subject but unwilling to grasp it.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

~ George Lakoff

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

~ George Lakoff

...[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of constraining how you can reason within that philosophical framework.

~ George Lakoff

By now, we're all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world's metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are … what again? Something

~ Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.

~ Truman Capote

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

~ George Eliot

It’s comforting to me,” he added, “that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.

~ Keith Hollihan

To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous

~ Yukio Mishima

The night had a nearly liquid quality, was like sliding into a warm swimming pool, a pool filled with buoyant darkenss instead of water.

~ Joe Hill

The flirty old moon eased his way across the warped and sooty floorboards and kissed my bare toes, turning my feet as luminous as the skin of cinema stars.

~ Cat Winters