Metaphor Quotes - Page 30

• Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

  Sharon Olds

  Thinking, Air, Years

  Interview with Dwight Garner for Salon Magazine, www.english.illinois.edu. July 1, 1996.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Love...doesn't need a complicated metaphor And sometimes nothing needs to be said at all

  Immortal Technique

  Needs, Complicated, Sometimes

  Song: Crimes Of The Heart

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean.  As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it.  That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge.  When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water.  We call this the moment of death.  That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

  Bill Viola

  Ocean, Moving, Water

  14 Copy quote

• It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

  C. S. Lewis

  Powerful, Offering, Order

  9 Copy quote

• The cartoon is a metaphor really for the fact that it's almost impossible in our celebrity obsessed culture to move around genres and sort of change you ideas, change your face, you know?

  Damon Albarn

  Moving, Ideas, Cartoon

  "Gorillaz in tha Midst". Interview with Spence D., www.ign.com. June 29, 2001.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.

  Gregory Bateson

  Together, Fabric, Alive

  84 Copy quote

• We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

  John Searle

  Umpires, Car, Understanding

  "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

  Alan Garner

  Coward, Cop, Used

  4 Copy quote

• Football is a metaphor for the kind of country we want to create. It's based on merit.

  Jack Kemp

  Football, Country, Want

  4 Copy quote

• Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way…Tradition would say I was a 'child of Mars.'

  James Hillman

  Children, Military, Book

  4 Copy quote

• Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate and learn, discover and invent.

  James Geary

  Thinking, Secret, Essentials

  "Metaphorically speaking". TEDGlobal Talk, www.ted.com. July 2009.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

  Derek Walcott

  Shadow

  " White Egrets by Derek Walcott" by Sarah Crown, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2010.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions.

  M. John Harrison

  Fun, Opportunity, Imagination

  4 Copy quote

• The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.

  Martin Gardner

  Book, Levels, Lasts

  Introduction to "The Annotated Alice. The Definitive Edition" by Lewis Carroll, 1999.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.

  Lorna Dee Cervantes

  Men, May, Whole Life

  Francisco X. Alarcón, Lorna Dee Cervantes (1989). “Chicanas Y Chicanos en Diálogo”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

  Scarlett Thomas

  Way, Mathematics, Using Me

  Scarlett Thomas (2008). “The End Of Mr. Y”, p.26, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I used the physical scar of my breast cancer operation, the scar that I have across my chest as a metaphor for all kinds of scars.

  Carly Simon

  Cancer, Scar, Kind

  7 Copy quote

• It's not necessarily a church theme and it's not really about church. I like my album themes to be metaphors because it gives me the freedom to speak about something else that's going on in my life, so the Born Sinner thing is not about church, it's not even about religion. It's using that as canvas to get other messages across and that's what the album will be.

  J. Cole

  Giving, Church, Albums

  21 Copy quote

• I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.

  Seth Lloyd

  Program, Capacity, Explanation

  7 Copy quote

• I don’t know how you look at the inside of your head — what metaphor you choose — but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.

  James St. James

  Yawning, Drug, Looks

  James St. James (2003). “Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation.

  Michael Ayrton

  Art, Depiction, Story Of My Life

  Michael Ayrton (1971). “The Rudiments of Paradise: Various Essays on Various Arts”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• About the fearful sphere which we inhabit, whose centre may be calculated and whose circumference is physically established, there spin metaphors whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference shows itself only through holes in the dark.

  Michael Ayrton

  Dark, Earth, May

  Michael Ayrton (1971). “The Rudiments of Paradise: Various Essays on Various Arts”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What I'm concerned about now is creating a metaphor for what the figure really is.

  Nathan Oliveira

  Creating, Figures, Concerned

  7 Copy quote

• Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.

  Jamie Wyeth

  Interesting, Mind, Frost

  7 Copy quote

• Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

  Walter Lippmann

  Men, Ideas, Language

  Walter Lippmann (2007). “Public Opinion”, p.67, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source