Metaphor Quotes - Page 33

• Life's metaphors are God's instructions.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Instruction

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.176, A&C Black

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• Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

  Terry Pratchett

  Men, Red Flags, Annoyed

  "Lords And Ladies". Book by Terry Pratchett, 1992.

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• ...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.

  Antonio Damasio

  Powerful, Simple, Light

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• The Saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor than was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe or outside, lost.

  Thomas Pynchon

  Lying, Tunnels, Light

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• But that's typical of me. "This is going to end in tears," I tell myself every time I balance a cup of coffee on the upholstered arm of the chair I'm sitting on. And then, lo and behold, the cup topples and even before it lands, I tell myself, "Told me so!" Not to spell out, or spill out, one of the metaphors of my life, but I always do the stupid thing and then I do it again. I never learn.

  Patricia Marx

  Stupid, Coffee, Land

  Patricia Marx (2008). “Him Her Him Again The End of Him”, p.173, Simon and Schuster

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• It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Different, May, Given

  Jorge Luis Borges (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.192, New Directions Publishing

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• So I should be aware of the dangers of self-consciousness, but at the same time, I’ll be plowing through the fog of all these echoes, plowing through mixed metaphors, noise, and will try to show the core, which is still there, as a core, and is valid, despite the fog. The core is the core is the core. There is always the core, that can’t be articulated. Only caricatured.

  Dave Eggers

  Echoes, Fog, Self

  Dave Eggers (2013). “A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story”, p.274, Simon and Schuster

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• Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

  Neil Postman

  Knowing, Culture, Television

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• The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

  Jack Zipes

  Struggle, Compassion, Community

  Jack Zipes (2013). “When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition”, p.1, Routledge

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• The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light...It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Beautiful, Morning, Moon

  Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Gilead: A Novel”, p.119, Macmillan

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• I sat on the bench outside of class today and talked to Jon. I read to him from my journal, it was the part about the accordian player I was watching on the street last weekend. He said that an accordian is such a perfect metaphor for Love, because you are always opening, and closing, shifting, and getting air, and that's how the music happens. True.

  Sabrina Ward Harrison

  Weekend, Player, Air

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• And so I began to read,' Sorkar said. 'And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophany. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my purpose, of where I was and who I was, of pain and I pressed on.

  Vikram Chandra

  Pain, Snakes, Feet

  Vikram Chandra (2011). “Red Earth and Pouring Rain”, p.277, Faber & Faber

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• It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

  Nick Hornby

  Romance, Dip, Natural

  Nick Hornby (2003). “Songbook”, p.52, Penguin

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• Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless.

  Gore Vidal

  War, Mean, Doubt

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• When King Lear dies in act five, do you know what Shakespeare has written? He has written, 'He dies.' No more. No fanfare, no metaphor, no brilliant final words. The culmination of the most influential piece of dramatic literature is, 'He dies.' Now I am not asking you to be happy at my leaving but all I ask you to do is to turn the page and let the next story begin. -- Mr. Magorium

  Suzanne Weyn

  Kings, Leaving, Pages

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• There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

  George Orwell

  People, Phrases, Trouble

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• Yeah, obviously we use vampires as a metaphor for something else, something deeper than just the supernatural. But there's just something about the bloodsucking walking dead, that can say so much to people. There are really so many people trying to get control over you on a daily basis and steal your soul in some way, take a part of you.

  Gerard Way

  People, Walking Dead, Over You

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• What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Thinking, Weight, Deeds

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• The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

  Mark Haddon

  Lying, Mean, Eye

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• Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.

  Lyall Watson

  Artist, Expression, Space

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• According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

  Abraham Verghese

  Broken, Tasks, Generations

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• I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.

  Neil Gaiman

  Morning, Lunch, Crow

  Neil Gaiman (2007). “Signal to Noise”, p.44, A&C Black

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• Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

  Milan Kundera

  Giving, Unbearable, Birth

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• Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

  Robert Frost

  Mean, Thinking, People

  "Education by Poetry". Robert Frost's speech at Amherst College in Massachusetts, www.en.utexas.edu. February 1931.

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• Look who's calling the cauldron black." "Kettle. It’s a kettle. Get your metaphors right." "That wasn’t a metaphor. It was a, you know..." He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that’s symbolic of another thing. But isn’t the same thing. Just like it." "You mean a metaphor?" "No! It’s like a story...like...a proverb! That’s it." "I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy." "I don’t think so.

  Richelle Mead

  Mean, Thinking, Space

  Richelle Mead (2011). “Succubus On Top”, p.102, Kensington Publishing Corp.

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