Metaphor Quotes

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

~ Sara Baume

It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.

~ Catherine Lacey

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.

~ Northrop Frye

Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom's Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.

~ Dan Chaon

Charter boats are like books with no covers.

~ Tania Aebi

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

~ Olivia Sudjic

In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.

~ Olivia Sudjic

I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.

~ Olivia Sudjic

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

~ Ally Condie

My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.

~ Hannah Lillith Assadi

Metaphorically, organizations are like vegetable gardens, where each capability is a different type of vegetable growing in the garden.

~ Pearl Zhu

Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Eloise's name and lured, too, by Eloise's conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the cousin was that in this golden age of peace and ever watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across this earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off light bulbs they aren't prepared for torches and forget that wings can burn.

~ Ada Palmer

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.

~ Lev Grossman

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

~ Alexandra Kleeman

Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?

~ Dexter Palmer

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.

~ Alexandra Kleeman

I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

~ Mark O'connell

He finds himself entering a minefield of dietary choices. My Dark Experiences With Gluten

~ Ash Bunsee

You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a genetic approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. Is that a metaphor? I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no.

~ Donald Barthelme

I set the coffee aside and got a cup of water instead. I could never see why people drank that stuff. It tasted like soil boiled in mud, wit a topping of dirt.

~ Brandon Sanderson

...both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when they were half-full, wearing a coat of shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the creek beds, wearing down the earth. Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.

~ Anna-Marie Mclemore

It's like raking leaves in the wind.

~ Charlie Raymond

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.

~ Thomas Hardy

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

~ Ruth Rendell

The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.

~ David Gianadda

A chill swept through the air, the sort of graveyard kiss promising bad news to follow.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

~ Haruki Murakami

Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells

~ Yann Martel

There's a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes... but it's still the only giant peach in town. Even if it's wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.

~ Cintra Wilson

I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.

~ Brandon Sanderson

The point is that if you think you can pinpoint the cause, then you can fool yourself into thinking you can avert the cause. It's deeply egotistical. It's life played as a grand insurance policy. Our myth-making around cancer stems from the same impulse. Because we don't know exactly why most of it happens, we weave a makeshift wisdom around it, a false prophet, which seeps into the common story and feeds our hunger to understand why. The guilt is a byproduct, a way to assign blame and seek absolution. It's a lesser evil than the forces of randomness. And it gives us the illusion of control.

~ Alanna Mitchell

I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She was all the raw colours of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple in man's form.

~ Pierce Brown

When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the wall toward them.

~ Stephanie Danler

Metaphorically, governance is like a “Steer,” Risk Management is like a “Brake.

~ Pearl Zhu

He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

~ Tana French

. . .the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.

~ Hanya Yanagihara