Metaphor Quotes

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

~ Thomas Pynchon

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath. The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience.

~ George Lakoff

My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

~ Alan Bradley

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

~ Audre Lorde

You know what they say about air and water when it comes to fire, don’t you?” she

~ Katherine Owen

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

~ Susan Sontag

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the French pox to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

~ Susan Sontag

You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you

~ John Green

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

~ Richard Powers

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

~ Norbert Wiener

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

~ Geoffrey Wood

So this is the boom, eh?” I said. “Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?” “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he said glumly. “It’s like being in Caligula’s Rome, and everyone around you’s having an orgy, and you’re the mug stuck looking after the horse.” He pulled heavily on his cigarette. “The whole thing’ll come crashing down,” he said bleakly, “and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.

~ Paul Murray

Some say you have only one shot in life, well if you get ammo, you can reload.

~ Micah Elza

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.

~ Susan Sontag

It´s a metaphor: you see, you put the killing thing right between your teeth,you just don't give it the power to do it's killing.

~ John Green

Beth's not on that train?Nope. She's not even in that station, that town, or that part of whatever country your metaphor lives in.

~ J.r. Ward

I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life.

~ John Scalzi

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

~ Aristotle

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging Say it new! Say it new! It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.

~ Leslie Jamison

Metaphor, everything is sort of Metaphor of something else.

~ Sameh Elsayed

Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.

~ John Le Carré

We are all but symbols of some greater thing—totems of ourselves--subject to change and growth. When we forget that metaphoric sense of ourselves, we lose sight of the overall path.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

There ́s a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul with strong Turkish roots. But the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures.

~ Elif Shafak

A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mintHad bundled itself in a stole of gray lint.

~ David Rakoff

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.

~ Jesmyn Ward

Peeling an OrangeBetween you and a bowl of oranges I lie nudeReading The World’s Illusion through my tears.You reach across me hungry for global fruit,Your bare arm hard, furry and warm on my belly.Your fingers pry the skin of a naval orangeReleasing tiny explosions of spicy oil.You place peeled disks of gold in a bizarre patternOn my white body. Rearranging, you bend and biteThe disks to release further their eager scent.I say “Stop, you’re tickling,” my eyes still on the page.Aromas of groves arise. Through green leavesGlow the lofty snows. Through red lipsYour white teeth close on a translucent segment.Your face over my face eclipses The World’s Illusion.Pulp and juice pass into my mouth from your mouth.We laugh against each other’s lips. I hold my bookBehind your head, still reading, still weeping a little.You say “Read on, I’m just an illusion,” rollingOver upon me soothingly, gently unmoving,Smiling greenly through long lashes. And soonI say “Don’t stop. Don’t disillusion me.”Snows melt. The mountain silvers into many a stream.The oranges are golden worlds in a dark dream.

~ Virginia Adair

YThat perfect letter. The wishbone, fork in the road, empty wineglass. The question we ask over and over. Why? Me with my arms outstretched, feet in first position. The chromosome half of us don't have. Second to last in the alphabet: almost there. Coupled with an L, let's make an adverb. A modest X, legs closed. Y or N? Yes, of course. Upside-down peace sign. Little bird tracks in the sand.Y, a Greet letter, joined the Latin alphabet after the Romans conquered Greece in the first century -- a double agent: consonant and vowel. No one used adverbs before then, and no one was happy.

~ Marjorie Celona

But it was like a dance across a field strewn with razors, and I bled with every step I took.

~ Ann Aguirre

You're saying,' he said, weighing each word, 'that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle.

~ Terry Pratchett

But how can you be there for someone who doesn't need you? It's like trying to scale a wall without anyone on the top throwing you a rope. You just keep sliding down and eventually your muscles give out, and your energy and your will and your heart.

~ Katie Kacvinsky

Until the thirst for power parched his throat, he was a fearless and noble lord.

~ Lloyd Alexander

I’ve never had a rat, never chased one. I chase my own tail and that’s enough. I must now make plans for the day I catch it.

~ Chila Woychik

Wrong, and wrong agains,' he said. 'The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we seek to make sense of our surroundings, our experiences, ourselves, seeing similarities, parallels, connections. We cannot help it. Even as the mind fails, it goes on trying to make sense of what is happening to it.

~ Connie Willis

Many Christians, including BioLogos, like to throw out the you can't take the Bible literally argument. They think it is the ultimate zinger that will end any debate in their favor. But if we shouldn't take the Bible literally, why should we believe God is real in the literal sense? Perhaps God is a metaphor also. Maybe God is really a metaphor for nature or chance. Heaven forbid! However, BioLogos insists on having it both ways: God is literally true but the Bible is not. That's like saying Mother Goose is literally true but her nursery rhymes are not.

~ G.m. Jackson

A month in and it seemed to CY that he was an explorer summiting the foothill of an a bizarre and primitive island.

~ Sarah Hall

Smoke and mirrors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon.

~ Michael Salter

Like a dog defeated in a frenzied circle by its own tail and slowing and realizing then that the tail it was after all along was already its possession

~ Sarah Hall

The whiskey kicked like a mugger.

~ Ken Bruen

A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples, a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry