Quotes about metaphors

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

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.

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.

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?”)

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

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.

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 can

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Metaphors: knowledge existing in several states and without contradiction

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

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.

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.

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 (imposs

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in

You touched my heart...ever so softlyand I realizedtears had never been...merely saltand the rainOh the Rain!had never been merely water.

The match I struck shall not run deadYou’re my first inhale, my last cigarette.

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

If his choice now was to risk either sunshine with a chance of rain or heatstroke with a chance of tornado, he’d go with the sunshine.

I killed it," Athan lamented. "I am a fool." His righteous anger, his arguments, his adoration for the being who claimed Eldaloth's name faded and disintegrated with all the suffering life behind him. A poisonous dread seeped as deep into his soul as the exultant honor and pride he had felt just minutes before. The vast gap between the two emotions a crater into which his very soul plummeted in free-fall.

Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.

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.

For somewhere," said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, "there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!

All wishes are best granted metaphorically. Metaphors are much easier to see than the real thing.

[His eyes are] Atlantic Ocean blue, just like he'd said. It's strange because of course I'd known that. But the difference between knowing it and seeing them in person is the difference between dreaming of flying and flight.

My mother may no longer be (if she ever was) a mast to which I can rope myself. But I fear the loss of Lesley. Without her observance, and her sturdy presence, I would feel windblown.

The joyous clamor in my mind drowned out the strange sound outside the car: a humming noise that was gathering speed and growing louder, a roar that was not the waves curling up the beach.

I want to paint the way a bird sings.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Know a man by his metaphors.

I hide myself behind, a cloud of smoke; the smoke screen varies, dependent on the variable. The variable consists of: stress, anguish, boredom, madness, anger, depression, apathy, negativity, sex, violence & a little chunk of chaos.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

Plenty of things in the universe are old, my dear. That's like saying Florida is a metaphor for hell because they're both hot - though your grandfather would agree wholeheartedly with that, I suppose.

After a bad trip, don't carry your luggage on board the next flight. Stay grounded til you figure out a new way to travel.

In this book, much is metaphorical, not as it seems. It’s written for writing’s sake, as if I were to say, “Let me tell you I’m dying.” Well of course I am. So are you.

Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.