Metaphor Quotes - Page 24

• The poet wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

  Cleanth Brooks

  Taken, Risk, Want

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• The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.

  Marion Woodman

  Body, May, Able

  Marion Woodman (1993). “Conscious Femininity: Interviews with Marion Woodman”

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• For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  Neil Postman

  Vegas, Messages, Television

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• You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

  Miguel Syjuco

  Memories, Cities, Shopping

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• The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Reality, Stronger, Palestine

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• Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

  Terry Eagleton

  Odds, Syntax, Literature

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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• My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Writing, Sound, Hook

  "Poetry Questions: Stephen Dobyns" by Rebecca Foresman, www.newyorker.com. April 2, 2012.

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• A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.

  Ann Brashares

  Beautiful, Tree, Growing

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• The days of the digitals are numbered. The metaphor is built into them like a self-destruct mechanism.

  Tom Stoppard

  Science, Technology, Self

  Tom Stoppard (1999). “Arcadia”

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• Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.

  James N. Frey

  Character, Writing, Interesting

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• [M]ilitary metaphors have more and more come to infuse all aspects of the description of the medical situation. Disease is seen as an invasion of alien organisms, to which the body responds by its own military operations, such as the mobilizing of immunological "defenses", and medicine is "aggressive" as in the language of most chemotherapies.

  Susan Sontag

  Military, Health, Medicine

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• The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.

  Taylor Hackford

  Devil, Levels, Whole

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

  Florence King

  Hero, Atheism, Trying

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• I talk a lot in metaphors. I get my words out but sometimes they don't make sense.

  David Boreanaz

  Sometimes, Make Sense

  Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. May 12, 2014.

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• The way music reflects real life, the way that painstakingly, over the years, what I have said is really a metaphor for what's happening to America. It used to be about, or tried to be at the very beginning, about what was right. It has stopped being what was right for America; it started being about what was right for companies that are in control.

  Immortal Technique

  Real, Years, America

  Source: www.gadflyonline.com

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• It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

  Deborah Tannen

  War, Taken, Fighting

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• The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.

  Donna Farhi

  Breathing, Way, Inevitable Change

  Donna Farhi (1996). “The Breathing Book: Good Health and Vitality Through Essential Breath Work”, p.5, Macmillan

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• This is a magical and inspiring metaphor through which adult readers will identify anger issues and discover practical methods to energize enduring change.

  Jeffrey K. Zeig

  Issues, Adults, Method

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• Milton Erickson was a master at using experiential techniques to elicit strengths that were previously dormant. Mills and Crowley have masterfully captured essential elements of Erickson's work and applied it to therapy with children. Easy to read, meticulously referenced, and filled with inspiring case studies, Therapeutic Metaphors for Children and the Child Within has now been updated with important new findings, and it's essential reading for clinicians who work with children as well as for those who want to improve their use of therapeutic metaphor.

  Jeffrey K. Zeig

  Children, Reading, Important

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• Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

  Wallace Stevens

  Reality, Unreal, Originals

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.250, Vintage

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• Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake.

  Anne Carson

  Mistake, Mind, Causes

  Anne Carson (2009). “Men in the Off Hours”, p.34, Vintage

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• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

  George Orwell

  Speech, Use, Figures

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

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• Im a believer in getting punched in the face. I know it sounds cliched, but to me, fighting is a metaphor for life.

  Frank Grillo

  Fighting, Sound, Faces

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• We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I dont think theres any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

  Guy Gavriel Kay

  Growing Up, Real, Eye

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• Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Fall, Men, Order

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