Metaphor Quotes - Page 6

Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.

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

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.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

The man's emotions flowed back and forth like waves of the sea.

Youth is like being carried through life by a strong current," Admiral Winter said. "All you feel is the speed of the river, the thrill of rapids, never comprehending your utter lack of control, your constant peril.

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

The soldier stared at Ingrid. His silence was elastic, slowly curling a rope around her neck.

It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.

I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.

Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.

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

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.

Birds shouldn't be able to find tearsThey are the definition of freedom

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

The predominant cancer metaphor is war. We fight cancer, usually valiantly. We attack tumors and try to annihilate them and bring out our arsenals to do that, and so on. It's us against cancer. This metaphor has come in for its share of criticism within the ethical, psychological and even oncological disciplines. A main concern is that when someone dies of cancer, the message that remains is that that person just hasn't fought hard enough, was not a brave enough soldier against the ultimate foe, did not really want to win.The cancer-is-war metaphor does not seem to allow space for the idea that in actual war, some soldiers die heroically for the larger good, no matter which side wins. War is death. In the cancer war, if you die, you've lost and cancer has won. The dead are responsible not just for getting cancer, but also for failing to defeat it.

They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

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.

Love is like a pane of glass.. It can take harsh beatings from the weather around it... But if it gets hit in the right place it shatters.. And when you try to pick it up... You end up getting cut.

When the sun touched the earth, it spread out along the horizon like a giant yolk oozing free of its skin.

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

No more light answers. Let our officersHave note what we purpose. I shall breakThe cause of our expedience to the QueenAnd get her leave to part. For not aloneThe death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,Do strongly speak to us, but the letters tooOf many our contriving friends in RomePetition us at home. Sextus PompeiusHath given the dare to Caesar and commandsThe empire of the sea. Our slippery people,Whose love is never linked to the deserverTill his deserts are past, begin to throwPompey the Great and all his dignitiesUpon his son, who - high in name and power,Higher than both in blood and life - stands upFor the main soldier; whose quality, going on,The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breedingWhich, like the courser's hair, hath yet but lifeAnd not a serpent's poison.

He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

The armored infantry was Santa Claus, the battle was out Christmas. What else for the elves to do on Christmas Eve but to let their hair down and drink a a little eggnog.

When people hurt you over and over, think of them like sandpaper. They may scratch and hurt you a bit, but in the end you end up polished and they end up useless.

Charter boats are like books with no covers.

Friends are like sugar. When you have them, you'll feel happiness. When you have too many of them, you will suffer.

I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life.

If Music is a Place -- then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

You were my dock. I am just a mere ship that has drifted farther and farther into the vast water. Many docks are in range, but I have yet to anchor and tie my rope.

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.

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

The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.

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.

As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.

You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time. It went on and on,-and on.

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Time is the moving image of eternity.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

I only thoughtOf lying quiet there where I was thrownLike sea-weed on the rocks, and suffer herTo prick me to a pattern with her pin,Fibre from fibre, delicate leaf from leaf,And dry out from my drowned anatomyThe last sea-salt left in me.

love was never meant to bejust a metaphorbetween the pages of poetry.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.

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…

You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.

I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue-sweet yet insubstantial.

When the devout religion of mine eyeMaintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,And these, who, often drowned, could never die,Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars!One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sunNe'er saw her match since first the world begun.

It’s comforting to me,” he added, “that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.

wen thectaste of my own medicine is given to me results into silent treatment,its not bitter therefore i enjoy the medicine i gave you too.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex? I never have to say: "What shall I compare this to?" a summer's day? No. I have to beat the comparisons back into the holes they pour from. Some salt is savory. I live in a sea.

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.