Metaphor Quotes

If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.

Snowflake’s journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly?I have no freaking clue.

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.

The power of the metaphor is that in a single flash the entire idea is revealed.

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

As I turned to leave, I looked down. Beside my foot, a sprout of greenery was clawing its way through the pristine nothingness to begin anew. It was later that I realized my haven had sent me a message, and it had shown me that nothing is ever completely lost, unless you cease searching.

He finds himself entering a minefield of dietary choices." My Dark Experiences With Gluten

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?

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.

...there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

...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.

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.

I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She was all the raw colours of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple in man's form.

Hatred is as easy as slipping on a well-worn woolen cloak. If only it provided the comfort of one.

The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength.But, as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious?How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes.

Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.

The salt is to the food, what soul is to the body.

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.

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.

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing.

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

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.

Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese

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.

Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

In my experiences, the common critic of Christianity, when he thinks of Christianity, imagines a sort of elementary, Sunday School blunder of elements: fiery Hell, an angry God, 'try not to sin', 'be good so that you can go to Heaven', absurd miracles, hyper-fundamentalist tales, religious hypocrites, and Jesus telling people not to judge. There is no horse more dead than such. I maintain that understanding Christianity and the Bible is quite like painting a piece of art. Let a toddler paint a puppy; then let an adult who is a long-time painter paint the very same puppy. They are both paintings of the puppy, but one is far more detailed, rational, realistic, and believable than the other. One is distorted and comical; the other is proportional and lively. One can write off Theology if he so pleases, but he might not be very wise in using the toddler's painting when it comes time to identify the real puppy or when trying to confront actual men of the Faith.

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.

Every human is a school subject. This is rather a metaphorical way of saying it, to put it straight, those you love are few, and the ones you detest are many.

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

Only with a leafcan I talk of the forest,

...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.

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.

Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?

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.

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.

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

The horizon changes but the sun does not.

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.

If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.

I look at him and my body reacts in a way that it never has before, even in the throes of passion. I look at him and I start aching so deep inside it takes all I can to think, to breathe, to speak. He’s like the brightest flame and it takes everything in me to resist its call.I know that if I give in, I’ll get burned so deeply, there might be nothing left once I come out the other side.But, god, I want to step into that flame.

She's the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.

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.

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

I stopped writing in the obvious. I wrote how I saw it and if they don’t understand it, that’s fine.

And metaphors like cats behind your smile,Each one wound up to purr,each one a pride,Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

The study of Scripture I find to be quite like mastering an instrument. No one is so good that they cannot get any better; no one knows so much that they can know no more. A professional can spot an amateur or a lack of practice or experience a mile away. His technicality, his spiritual ear is razor-sharp. He is familiar with the common mistakes, the counter-arguments; and insofar as this, he can clearly distinguish the difference between honest critics of the Faith and mere fools who criticize that which they know nothing.

Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

...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.

I'm like a circus standing on two legs.

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

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.

My mom’s smile is genuine,A lilac beamingIn the presence of her Sun.Indentions in the sand proveTime’s linear progression,Her hair yet unblighted,Carrying midnight’s consistency.Clear tracks fading as theMovement slips furtherIn the past.CheekbonesHigh, soft,In summer’s hue,Hopeful.Each step’s unknown impact,A future looking back.My father’s strength:One whoseLife is in his arms.Squinting past the camera,He rests upon a rockLike caramel corn half eaten,Just to the leftOf man-made concrete conventionDaylight’s eraserRemoving color to his right.Dustin sitsIn my father’s lap,Open mouth of a droolingBig mouth bass;Muscle toneOf a well exercisedJelly fish,He looks at meHalf aware;His wheelchairPerched at the edgeOf parking lot gravel graftedLike a scar on nature’s beach,Opening to the ironic splendorOf a bitter tasting lake.I took the picture.Age 11.Capturing the pinnacle arcOf a sonTo my lilacWhoOutlived him and weeps,Still.Their sky has staple holes –Maybe that’s how theLightLeaked out.

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.

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