Metaphor Quotes

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

~ Haruki Murakami

Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?

~ Alex Flinn

But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids.I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again,pulling me upward into light,to drown.

~ Sarah Dessen

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

~ Elizabeth Gilbert

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)

~ Ilsa J. Bick

Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.

~ Andrew Davidson

Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors

~ James Hillman

What's this? he inquired, none too pleasantly. A circus?No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.I see. And these are the clowns?Foaly's head poked through the doorway.Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?

~ Eoin Colfer

She's all over us like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with one pickpocket yesterday.

~ Tamora Pierce

It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.

~ Shannon Hale

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

~ Roberto Bolaño

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

~ George Eliot

The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody’s metaphors for it; I’d said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.

~ Brandon Sanderson

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

~ Juliet Marillier

It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.

~ Andrei Codrescu

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

~ Margaret Atwood

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

~ Barry Lyga

The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.

~ Joseph Campbell

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.

~ Jeanette Winterson

METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.

~ Chris Ware

We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

~ Maggie O'farrell

Life is like a B-picture script.

~ Kirk Douglas

Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain

~ Zora Neale Hurston

Only with a leafcan I talk of the forest

~ Visar Zhiti

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

~ Sarah Blake

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?

~ Richard Powers

It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.

~ Roger Zelazny

She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition.

~ Janet Flanner

... we [can] catch fish and just throw them back... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then... one [may] swallow the hook...[it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I've swallowed it big time.

~ Graham Mcnamee

They're holding flushes of face cards, and I think we're the pot.

~ Howard Tayler

It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow--such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father's fist.

~ Elissa Janine Hoole

In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.

~ Craig Raine

Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life. The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan. The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.

~ Jaimal Yogis

Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.

~ Richard Condon

Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal the mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.

~ William Shakespeare

My master gives me bread and beer and every good thing.

~ Garret Keizer

Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.

~ Natasha Pulley

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

~ Catherine Lacey

Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese

~ Spencer Johnson

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

~ Spencer Johnson