Metaphor Quotes - Page 15

• American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

  Grant Morrison

  Dog, Powerful, Writing

  "The Super Psyche of Comic Book Shaman Grant Morrison". Interview with Gavin Edwards, www.playboy.com. April 18, 2012.

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• The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Real, Men, Islands

  "The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel". Book by Jose Ortega y Gasset. Chapter "Taboo and Metaphor", 1925.

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• No one made a decision to militarize the police in America. The change has come slowly, the result of a generation of politicians and public officials fanning and exploiting public fears by declaring war on abstractions like crime, drug use, and terrorism. The resulting policies have made those war metaphors increasingly real.

  Radley Balko

  Real, War, Drug Use

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• Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

  Morton Feldman

  Cages, Parables, Music Is

  Morton Feldman (2006). “Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964-1987”

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• To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe ... not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it ... except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life ... if you're into it.

  Morton Feldman

  Attitude, Should Have, Ideas

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• King in Crimson is actually an alchemical term. King Crimson is a metaphor for Devil or Satan, but at the same time it's also a metaphor for one of the statures in the purification of man and the purification of mankind soul towards union with God and with Infinite, which is the philosophical aim of alchemists.

  Bruce Dickinson

  Kings, Philosophical, Men

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• I am convinced that pilgrimage is still a bona fide spirit-renewing ritual. But I also believe in pilgrimage as a powerful metaphor for any journey with the purpose of finding something that matters deeply to the traveler. With a deepening of focus, keen prepartion, attention to the path below our feet, and respect for the destination at hand, it is possible to transform, even the most ordinary journey into a sacred journey, a pligrimage.

  Phil Cousineau

  Powerful, Believe, Journey

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• I've simplified much more in my writing. I say what I've got to say, not in metaphor.

  Marianne Faithfull

  Writing

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. July 28, 2011.

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• Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life.
  The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan.
  The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.

  Jaimal Yogis

  Sex, Rest Of Life, Sick

  Mu Soeng, Jaimal Yogis (2010). “Saltwater Buddha: A Surfers Quest to Find Zen on the Sea (Large Print 16pt)”, p.121, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it's intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you're the dog.

  James Taranto

  Dog, People, Politics

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• Yoga is a metaphor for life. You have to take it really slowly. You can't rush. You can't skip to the next position. You find yourself in very humiliating situations, but you can't judge yourself. You just have to breathe, and let go. It is a workout for your mind, your body and your soul.

  Madonna Ciccone

  Letting Go, Workout, Yoga

  "Hot Celebrity Bodies Shaped by Yoga", www.foxnews.com. June 6, 2012.

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• Detroit is a metaphor for America, for America's challenges and America's opportunities. It is a hothouse for new innovation, for ingenuity and risk taking. That doesn't happen in a lot of American cities. We need to be in Detroit because of that.

  Darren Walker

  Opportunity, Cities, America

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• And as hearbes and trees are bettered and fortified by being transplanted, so formes of speach are embellished and graced by variation.... As in our ordinary language, we shall sometimes meete with excellent phrases, and quaint metaphors, whose blithnesse fadeth through age, and colour is tarnish by to common using them.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Tree, Age, Ordinary

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• You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be.

  Roni Horn

  Home, Use, World

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• It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.

  Alberto Manguel

  Ivory Tower, Games, Ideas

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• Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.

  Carl Sagan

  Psychology, Independence, Human Condition

  Carl Sagan (2012). “Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence”, p.83, Ballantine Books

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• The moral immune system of this country has been weakened and attacked, and the AIDS virus is the perfect metaphor for it. The malignant neglect of the last twelve years has led to breakdown of our country's immune system, environmentally, culturally, politically, spiritually and physically.

  Barbra Streisand

  Country, Years, Perfect

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• I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

  Sidney Lanier

  Style, Faults, Disposition

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• I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

  Julian Barnes

  Grief, Fall, Writing

  "Julian Barnes: The sense of another ending". Interview with Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. March 30, 2013.

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• Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

  Jonathan Raban

  Travel, Book, Journey

  Jonathan Raban (1987). “For love & money: writing, reading, travelling, 1969-1987”

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• Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

  Mary Catherine Bateson

  Memories, Thinking, Games

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• Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

  John Ralston Saul

  Competition, Anarchy, Naive

  John Ralston Saul (2012). “The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

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• Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Reality, Glasses

  Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter, Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) (2002). “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting”, p.49, The Museum of Modern Art

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• A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there-a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle.

  Gregg Easterbrook

  Inspiration, Heart, Past

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• I have a true aversion to teaching. The perennial business of a professor of mathematics is only to teach the ABC of his science; most of the few pupils who go a step further, and usually to keep the metaphor, remain in the process of gathering information, become only Halbwisser [one who has superficial knowledge of the subject], for the rarer talents do not want to have themselves educated by lecture courses, but train themselves. And with this thankless work the professor loses his precious time.

  Carl Friedrich Gauss

  Education, Teaching, Science

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