Metaphor Quotes

In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?

~ Louise O'neill

Boundaries help us to distinguish our property so that we can take care of it. They help us to guard our heart with all diligence. We need to keep things that will nurture us inside our fences and keep things that will harm us outside.

~ Henry Cloud

Don't stir all the warmth out of your coffee, drink it.

~ Kate Chopin

In short, if you are using a shovel to dig yourself into a hole, a credit card company will be happy to give you a backhoe.

~ Jason G. Miller

...maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems--maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.

~ Jodi Picoult

I'm sorry you lost the suit,' he said.She shrugged.'At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,' she said...

~ James S.a. Corey

I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing just about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.

~ Rachel Hartman

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.

~ Shahriar Mandanipour

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.

~ Lauren Groff

My words are like Mummy: butterflies trapped inside a net.

~ Holly Bodger

Love is like a climbing rope. There are little knots along the way, but if you learn off of them, you can get higher than you ever expected.

~ A.m.l.

We are not just tickling the dragon’s tail, we are timing a flyby through its open jaws while it is yawning.

~ Marko Kloos

It was a quiet taunt...a poisoned glass of wine, meant to intoxicate and exsanguinate.

~ Renee Ahdieh

Mind you,” said Ponder, “the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death—” “Chicken soup and croutons,” said Ridcully. Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination.

~ Terry Pratchett

He sips his drink and it leaves his handlebar mustache dripping like a cattle dog come outta a river.

~ Erin Bowman

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

~ Matthew De Abaitua

You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time. It went on and on,-and on.

~ Bess Streeter Aldrich

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.

~ Brian Doyle

My knee struck a tree root as my vision went black. Suddenly, I was in a building at Haven Crest, kneeling on the floor. Blood, thick and clotted like canned cherries, crept down the walls. The lights above my head flickered off then on with a menacing hum.

~ Kady Cross

His studies were always second to Beatrice. He would've said everything was second to Beatrice but the flowery metaphors and literary devices can only stretch so far and for so many characters.

~ Bruce Crown

He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every word tacked nine-inches deep into the beams of our minds.

~ Chigozie Obioma

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.

~ Matthew De Abaitua

...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.

~ Haruki Murakami

Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.

~ Mary Karr

I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue-sweet yet insubstantial.

~ Rachel Vincent

And feast on the dead, I thought with a shudder. As if he could read my thoughts, he pressed a hand to my shoulder. His fingers were long and white, splaying over my arm like a waxen spider. If the gesture was meant to comfort me, it failed.

~ Leigh Bardugo

Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.

~ René Magritte

In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air.

~ Claire Fuller

I'm trying to keep you safe. Safe as a porcelain bowl wrapped in cotton linen and boxed up. It would be a lie to say she didn't want to feel safe, or that Nolan's worry didn't leave her feeling warm and even a bit precious. But it also left her feeling trapped, like an ornamental bird kept in a cage, its wings clipped.

~ Page Morgan

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil.

~ Christopher Paolini

This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.

~ Bryant A. Loney

You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.

~ Shirley Jump

Is there anyone nearby you can speak to without words?”“I don’t know. I only know that there are those whose minds I can speak with that, when I show them how, speak back to my mind as well.

~ Tom Larcombe

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

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove my friend before offering to sell him a watch.

~ Fredrik Backman

Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!

~ Fred Van Lente

Speech is the pen and the sword of humankind and it is the foundation of their kingdom. Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies are. defeated and scattered. In the arenas in which speech shouts out, the sounds of cannon balls become like the buzzing of bees. from behind the battlements on which the banner of speech has been raised, the sound of its drums are heard. In the precincts where its march reverberates, kings shake in their boots. The Master of Speech smashed to pieces many insurmountable walls, in the face of which Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and many others despaired or retread; and the pen of Speech, imparting and compliance, was saluted and praised.

~ M. Fethullah Gülen

…The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

~ Brian Greene

If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.

~ Brian Greene