Metaphor Quotes - Page 17

• I think climbing mountains or buildings or whatever has been a really good metaphor for finishing my work. Because no matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can't possibly do this, somehow you do.

  Octavia Butler

  Tired, Thinking, Climbing

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• Every time some new huckster of angst-ridden metaphor is appointed by Art Forum, the congregation genuflects, stroking the catalog like a handful of Rosary beads, and starts spreading that old gospel according to Hyperbole. No questions asked... And thus the bill of goods is sold, all along the line. An art historical snake, swallowing its own tale.

  Abe Ajay

  Art, Snakes, Historical

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• Tonight, I should watch the sun set, and think of the impending darkness as a metaphor for my wasted life: once it was bright, and full of potential, and now it is dark and hopeless and bleak. I should not make the mistake of thinking that the moon and the stars represent slim glimmers of hope, or evidence that there is light on the other side. Even if there is light somewhere I will never walk in it again.

  John S. Hall

  Stars, Mistake, Dark

  "Daily Negations". Book by John S. Hall, 2007.

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• Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.

  Julian Jaynes

  Real, Vocabulary, Mind

  Julian Jaynes (2000). “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, p.65, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Ghosts are a metaphor for memory and remembrance and metaphorically connect our world to the world we cannot know about.

  Leslie What

  Memories, Our World, Remembrance

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• A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief.

  Kelly Link

  Sex, Hate, Real

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• Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can--plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

  Bentley Little

  Real, Writing, Novelists

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• Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.

  Giannina Braschi

  Envy, Democratic, Simile

  "United States of Banana". Book by Giannina Braschi, 2011.

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• A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.

  Matthew Woodring Stover

  Powerful, Enough, Grows

  Matthew Woodring Stover (2008). “Blade of Tyshalle”, p.379, Del Rey

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• A world ends when its metaphor has died.

  Archibald MacLeish

  World, Ends, Died

  Archibald MacLeish (1976). “New & collected poems, 1917-1976”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.

  Jane Austen

  Rain, Illustration, Ideas

  Jane Austen (2016). “Jane Austen The Dover Reader”, p.516, Courier Dover Publications

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• I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

  Anna Quindlen

  Family, Writing, Thinking

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• It was a saying of the ancients, "Truth lies in a well;" and to carry on this metaphor, we may justly say that logic does supply us with steps, whereby we may go down to reach the water.

  Isaac Watts

  Lying, Water, Doe

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• The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

  Patricia Hampl

  Light, Substance, Golden

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• Fantasy is a literature particularly useful for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil. In an America where our reality may seem degraded to posturing patriotism and self-righteous brutality, imaginative literature continues to question what heroism is, to examine the roots of power, and to offer moral alternatives. Imagination is the instrument of ethics. There are many metaphors besides battle, many choices besides war, and most ways of doing good do not, in fact, involve killing anybody. Fanstasy is good at thinking about those other ways.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Real, War, Thinking

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• Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

  Susan Sontag

  Unjust, Illness, Used

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.56, Penguin UK

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• The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

  Susan Sontag

  Spiritual, Journey, Voyages

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.

  Marilyn Ferguson

  Buddhist, Night, Flames

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• Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.

  Taner Edis

  Writing, Heart, Reality

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• Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.

  Stephen Shore

  Art, Mean, Levels

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• You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.

  Robert Gottlieb

  Fate, Murder Mysteries, Psychics

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• Food is a great metaphor for the consolidation of corporate power in the hands of very few, who are mostly interested in their own profits and not the wellbeing of the animals they're slaughtering, or the land and the water they're using or abusing, or the workforce they're exploiting or even the people eating it.

  Robert Kenner

  Animal, Hands, Land

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

  Hortense Calisher

  Writing, Phrases, Stories

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• Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Vocabulary, Stones, Steel

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• No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

  Grace Paley

  Jobs, Children, Nurture

  Grace Paley (2014). “Begin Again: Collected Poems”, p.4, Macmillan

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