Metaphors Quotes

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

~ Milan Kundera

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

~ H.l. Mencken

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

~ Orson Scott Card

Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun;Thyself from thine affectionTakest warmth enough, and from thine eyeAll lesser birds will take their jollity.Up, up, fair bride, and callThy stars from out their several boxes, takeThy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and makeThyself a constellation of them all;And by their blazing signifyThat a great princess falls, but doth not die.Be thou a new star, that to us portendsEnds of much wonder; and be thou those ends.

~ John Donne

Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wächst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag! Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein und Blütenüberfluss sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein und Leben kein Genuss.

~ Hermann Hesse

A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

~ Aberjhani

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

~ Philip Pullman

Solitary walks are great for getting new ideas. It's like you're in a video game and you pick up idea coins on the way.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states and without contradiction

~ G. Willow Wilson

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

~ Fernando Pessoa

I'm always amazed that people will stand around books for hours and only look at the spine. I think I should write a book called the power of having a spine - #metaphor

~ Richie Norton

She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Like petals what's beautiful is often delicate. Take care of the ones you love by not holding them too tightly

~ Nicola An

A fleeting second on someone's news feed,No dearth of meanings for those who read,Not my stories but 'tis what I think,I say I don't write poems, I just write dreams.

~ Sanhita Baruah

Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.

~ John Green

What a wonderful world it could be, when spiritual factions would choose to read sacred writings as colorful metaphors and not as bloody declarations of war. (“Is heaven a place in the sky?”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

Between the beach and the big breaking waves about a quarter mile off was a stretch of bumpy, glistening reef, its usual blanket of water pulled back by a celestial hand.

~ Mary Ellen Hannibal

Artists are the flowers of our world. The best ones are those who can stand out from the crowd by becoming a memorable flower — one that moves us, inspires us, and makes us think hard. A flower with no smell to it is just something to look at. A flower that emits a beautiful fragrance is the one we want in our homes and on our walls. Your mission as an artist, is to become the best-smelling flower in the world, so that when the day finally comes when you are plucked from the ground, the world will cry for the loss of your mind-stimulating fragrance. Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in garden loaded with thousands of the same yellow flower, but they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.

~ Suzy Kassem

The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, “Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear.

~ Ryan Lilly

People who want to climb mountains just like taking metaphors for real. So when I say I could murder for a mangosteen, I hope you don’t think I’m going to go out and do that.

~ Initially No

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

~ Terry Pratchett

His music gave no lesser joy than a vacation. Creativity in his music and its success stood out as an example to all kinds of artists, in the lectures of business speakers, engineers, and to anyone who built or constructed something in their respective profession.

~ Amit Kalantri

I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms.

~ Munia Khan

Who's to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change and it changed.

~ Eliot Pattison

The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.

~ Aberjhani

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

~ Ray Bradbury

Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie.

~ Peter Gould

Sometimes it can be as brutally overwhelming as a tidal wave flooding every orifice, the suffocation, the pressure, the immensity of this damnable depression like an ocean, unsurmountable. It swallows me whole and gnaws at my very bones. It floods me over and over, drowning me over and over... It is a torturous broken record player with a scratched disc on repeat, the wailing disrupting any possible good remaining after the tsunami. It wails and wails inside my ribcage and inside my skull. I cannot make it stop.

~ Moonshine Noire

Lead's erasing then vanishingBanished from whatever it is they're drinking and it's cleanedRunning from the pitcher as if it's her fantasy

~ Criss Jami

The idea is to spin the wheel of metaphors and images until sparks of associations begin to fly for the reader.

~ Charles Simic

If women are breadwinners and men bring home the bacon, why do people complain about having no dough? I'm confused. Also hungry.

~ Stephen Colbert

Portland was a dream both in the literal sense and the metaphorical sense, both tangible and not - a fleeting affair you want to hold on to but can't, so you try memorizing her every detail only to fail to do so in the consumption, in the savoring, in the absorbing of yourself into her. When she's gone, she comes to you in snippets, replaying in your mind like a fragmented picture show.

~ Jackie Haze

I have no rules. For me, it's a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You're looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I'd like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you're a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.

~ David Cronenberg

Her eyes burrow into my forehead like greedy grubs that want to feed off my private thoughts.

~ Emlyn Chand

Energy doesn't speak English, Spanish or Chinese, but it does speak clearly. It speaks through the metaphors of our lived experiences, through the rain, floods, drought, earthquakes, excessive heat, unseasonable cold or the erupting volcanoes of nature. It communicates through the itches, pains, boils and pimples, through congestion, vertigo and backaches of the body. Energy speaks through our feelings that have nothing at all do with us, but are reflective of what is happening in the field. And, lastly, it speaks through synchronicities, coincidences and dreams that communicate messages which our conscious minds could not have known. This language of Energy, like any new tongue, is challenging.

~ Elaine Seiler

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.You have never spoken before.

~ China Miéville

Culture is like water in the sea, it can either keep the business ship afloat or drag it down and sink it.

~ Pearl Zhu

Know a man by his metaphors.

~ John Connolly

What is it that you contain? The dead, time, light patterns of millenia opening in your gut. What is salted up in the memory of you? Memory past and memory future.

~ Jeanette Winterson

for those memories are nowjust like these little kittensI hold in my handsthose can be kissedand treasuredbut not held too tightly.

~ Sanober Khan