Metaphor Quotes - Page 3

The well-being of a neuron depends on its ability to communicate with other neurons. Studies have shown that electrical and chemical stimulation from both a neuron's inputs and its targets support vital cellular processes. Neurons unable to connect effectively with other neurons atrophy. Useless, an abandoned neuron will die.

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll's house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

He sips his drink and it leaves his handlebar mustache dripping like a cattle dog come outta a river.

I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.

Her voice was a hushed whisper against my ear. An audible smile.

Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.

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.

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

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man

I left the room before I could figure out exactly what bothered me about his response. Was it the way it seemed to assume a future for the two of us? A future in which I would continue to be unable to leave this house? Was it the presumption that I was making a cake for him when, really, I had no idea why I was making a cake at all?

Metaphor, everything is sort of Metaphor of something else.

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

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.

And as he leaned in to kiss me, my eye saw his open mouth grow larger and larger until it seemed it could swallow me whole.

Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.

A chill December morning dawned, with rags and tatters of mist hanging on the trees like poor people’s washing.

If a car can represent something, this one represents contradiction. For most of his life, my dad has been able to have any woman he wants. In response, he’s gone through as many as possible, betraying each for someone younger and more absurd. Conversely, for most of his life he’s been able to have any car he wants, too. In response, he’s remained married to this, a 1982 Porsche with a tricky clutch.

At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.

It's a commonly expressed and rather nice, romantic notion that we are all "sisters" and "brot

I'm sorry you lost the suit,' he said.She shrugged.'At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,' she said...

The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest.

The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

That’s the only thing you can do with a mess. Start cleaning it up, a little at a time.

He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every word tacked nine-inches deep into the beams of our minds.

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

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.

That one,” Ferox said, pointing at Johann with a claw. “I can see he’s communicated like that before and I think I can speak to his mind. Let me see.”“After a moment, Johann broke from the line and approached the dragon.“You did ask me to come closer, didn’t you?” he asked.“Yes, I can speak to this one. He can be my rider.

I refuse to be put in a cage that gleams golden for many, but bronze for me. I would much rather be a dove in the sky, flying out into the open, into the sky, into the beyond.

In short, if you are using a shovel to dig yourself into a hole, a credit card company will be happy to give you a backhoe.

In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings.

Running wild in a field of exclamations, chasing question marks

It's not always so easy," she said softly."Why not? It's a part of who you are, isn't it?" he asked with all the sympathy of an asp being prodded with a stick.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil.

It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.

She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition.

But my brain winds and wends. Back and forth. Up and down. It feels like the county fair has inhabited my mind-- complete with sketchy rides, carnies, and sugar-amped kids crying over lost balloons. So loud and disorienting. I want it to pack up and move on to the next town. I want my mind to be an open grassy field again with crickets and dandelions.

when he was afraid to changed he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there

This feeling of lessening disturbance, coming from within myself, unexpected, was profoundly disturbing. As I sat still, growing less and less alarmed by the situation, I knew that I had to move fast, as fast and as far as I could within this small, cramped house.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even be a story about an actual trip to Mars!

I set the coffee aside and got a cup of water instead. I could never see why people drank that stuff. It tasted like soil boiled in mud, wit a topping of dirt.

Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.

You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a "genetic" approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. "Is that a metaphor?" I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no.

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there's plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

If funkytown was a trailerpark, this guy would be a double-wide.

But that’s life right? It’s just a shitty hand of cards. But then maybe somebody pulls out an Ace, and somebody else gets a four, or a ten. It’s all in the draw and how you play it.

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.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.

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

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.