Metaphor Quotes

I am a shark. A shark who dreamed he was a man.

~ Rick Yancey

In the time we spend reeling in confusion, grasping at straws trying to piece our egos together, we forget to acknowledge some things. Society created gender roles and categorizations and lifestyles and names and titles because we fear the unknown, especially when the unknown is us.It’s as though we’re stranded in the middle of an ocean, but we were promised the current would bring us back ashore. We’re given all we need on the life raft. As far as we can see, we’re being led back, slowly. We don’t know when we’ll approach the shore, but all evidence points to the fact that we will. But we don’t spend our time looking around, enjoying the view, seeing who came with us, and riding out the waves. We sit and panic about what we’re doing and why we came here.It doesn’t matter where we started because we may never know. It matters where we’re going, because that, we do. We begin and we end. We’ve seen one, so there’s only one other option.

~ Brianna Wiest

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

~ Salman Rushdie

The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.

~ C.s. Forester

Everything was a metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like...like...he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.

~ Iain M. Banks

A poem without metaphor is a gelding, useless to nightmares.

~ David Joseph Cribbin

I was convinced that she was about to tell me my card was declined, and assumed Derek wanting to talk later meant he'd soon be telling me our life was declined. Everything, everyone had reached their limits with me.

~ Joshua Mohr

Anne tried to bite her tongue, but she was finding her mouth bloody too often.

~ Janice Lane Palko

I'm going to be frank, Max...Of course. All cards on the table. But he gave me a poker smile.

~ Alfred Alcorn

Metaphor is a slippery eel, if it wasn't for its shock I'd stick to the easy catch of prose.

~ David Joseph Cribbin

The water never stops, never gives up, and denies no faults in the path it takes,” he explained, my eyes still focused down the ravine, “It moves silently, only a mere trickle to entertain itself as it causes a massive gash in the world. This, Zack, is true power.

~ Daniel Z Hastings

Acoustics reverberate inside of Lucy Anna, bouncing off her walls and slamming against her bars. Harmonic prison.

~ Kelby Losack

A mist rises from a nearby mound. It could be me, that mist, or simply the caretaker’s mower-dust. If the breeze blows just right, I’ll ghost your solid, entwine your hair. Promise me you won’t shampoo, but carry me along, tiny dust-particles of me.

~ Chila Woychik

I feel all agitated, like one of those snow globes you see resting peacefully on shop counters. I was perfectly happy being an ordinary, dull little Swiss village. But now Jack Harper’s come and shaken me up, and there are snowflakes all over the place, whirling around until I don’t know what I think anymore. And bits of glitter, too. Tiny bits of shiny, secret excitement.

~ Sophie Kinsella

Delia was an overbearing cake with condescending frosting, and frankly, I was on a diet.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

My mother always says that love is like a snakebite, a venom slowly spreading through your veins.

~ Cynthia Hand

One more piece of sky in the jigsaw puzzle of our school.

~ Em Bailey

GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…

~ Tom Stoppard

Did you ever get the feeling that everything was too perfect? Like the moment was so good that something had to be wrong? Kind of like the way a fish sees that bright, shiny lure just before it chomps down and gets hauled out of water to become someone's lunch.

~ Neal Shusterman

If a tree is bent, every goat will jump on it.

~ Eva Stachniak

...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn...

~ Anne Rivers Siddons

The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.

~ Graham Joyce

...a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.

~ Ned Beauman

At last he was to feel that he had the town, as it were, in his pocket, and was ready for anything. Accordingly he sent a confidential messenger to Rome, to ask his father what step he should next take, his power in Gabii being, by God's grace, by this time absolute. Tarquin, I suppose, was not sure of the messenger's good faith: in any case, he said not a word in reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air went out to the garden. The man followed him, and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence, began knocking off poppy-heads with his stick. The messenger at last wearied of putting his question and waiting for the reply, so he returned to Gabii supposing his mission to have failed. He told Sextus what he had said and what he had seen his father do: the king, he declared, whether from anger, or hatred, or natural arrogance, had not uttered a single word. Sextus realized that though his father had not spoken, he had, by his action, indirectly expressed his meaning clearly enough; so he proceeded at once to act upon his murderous instructions.

~ Livy

The HBS logo shone high above, a surrogate sun for the overcast day.

~ Jack Heath

Most people, including yourself, apparently, think The Moldau is about a river. It is not. It is a metaphor. It is about the progress of life, from its fragile beginnings through its joys and turbulence and on to its end, its magnificent end.

~ Gerald Elias

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

~ Don Delillo

Give up the idea that by ruling over others you can do any good to them. But you can do just as much as you can in the case of the plant: you can supply the growing seed with the materials for the making up of its body, bringing to it the earth, the water, the air, that it wants. It will take all that it wants by its own nature, it will assimilate and grow by its own nature.

~ Swami Vivekananda

His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway

~ Jerry Spinelli

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

~ Gustave Flaubert

Together a brick and a blanket create the perfect metaphor for life. Will you be a brick and make something of your life, or be a blanket and sleep your life away?

~ Amy Sommers

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

~ Stephen King

The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.

~ Pat Buchanan

Language is memory and metaphor.

~ Storm Jameson

'The Iliad' includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.

~ Katherine Dunn

Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.

~ Ray Bradbury

Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor.

~ Jeanne Marie Laskas

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

~ Gilbert K. Chesterton