Metaphor Quotes

All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It's like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

~ Stephen King

You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.

~ James S.a. Corey

It was like the panting of a thousand puppies.

~ Jerry Spinelli

It is like the panting of a thousand puppies.

~ Jerry Spinelli

If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.

~ John Bunyan

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

~ Annie Dillard

Ella! the voice yells, but I cannot tell where it is coming from. The sound wraps around me, spreading like spilt water and then evaporating into silence.

~ Beth Revis

Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

~ Jeanette Winterson

[Francesca] 'You really are a few biscuits short of breakfast.'His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.'You're a few colors shy of a rainbow?' she offered. 'Not pulling a full wagon? Knitting with only one needle? All foam and no beer? Your cheese slid off the cracker? You couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel?'[Nicodemus] 'All right. I get it.

~ Blake Charlton

But my brain winds and wends. Back and forth. Up and down. It feels like the county fair has inhabited my mind-- complete with sketchy rides, carnies, and sugar-amped kids crying over lost balloons. So loud and disorienting. I want it to pack up and move on to the next town. I want my mind to be an open grassy field again with crickets and dandelions.

~ Laura Munson

It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I'm not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.' She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Maddock stabbed his fried egg with his fork, and bright yellow yolk bled all over his plate like a sunshine hemorrhage.

~ Rachel Vincent

When the sun touched the earth, it spread out along the horizon like a giant yolk oozing free of its skin.

~ Christopher Paolini

Like the feeling of a carbonated beverage slipping down the throat, the bubbles rushing and popping as they make their descent, the air around a departed spirit fizzles, dissipating from a thick electric presence to an ephemeral blink of light and color, like the aftereffect of too many flash cameras going off at once.

~ Eda J. Vor

I was on the sidewalk, buffering, wondering if it was okay to follow people in real life.

~ Olivia Sudjic

A river starts by longing for the ocean...

~ Will Advise

There's always hope. And oceans. Hope and oceans.

~ Bryant A. Loney

That’s the only thing you can do with a mess. Start cleaning it up, a little at a time.

~ Lisa Wingate

Fracture lines etch the surface of the glass box as if a body fell from the sky and landed on it. He doesn't hear the impact, can't smell the blood.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Not all beaches are fun and sunscreen.

~ Bryant A. Loney

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

~ Werner Heisenberg

I only thoughtOf lying quiet there where I was thrownLike sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer herTo prick me to a pattern with her pin,Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,And dry out from my drowned anatomyThe last sea-salt left in me.

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her FaceEnchants all those whom once She doth embrace,Nor is ther any can Her bewty prizeBut he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:Those following Leaves display, if well observed,How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.

~ James Howell

Not everything that happens in your life has to hit you like a hurricane.

~ Joyce Rachelle

When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.

~ Lauren Oliver

Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!', the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gamboling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

~ George Orwell

If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.

~ Dorothy Gambrell

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.

~ Padma Venkatraman

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

~ Isaac Marion

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?

~ John Green

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

~ Jandy Nelson

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

~ Anne Lamott

It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.

~ Malcolm X

I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.

~ David Levithan

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

~ Susan Sontag

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like ared flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front ofsomeone who was annoyed by it.

~ Terry Pratchett

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

~ Wendy Mass

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

~ Joseph Campbell