Metaphor Quotes - Page 34

• He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

  Neil Gaiman

  Gone, World, Simile

  "Neverwhere". Book by Neil Gaiman, 1996.

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• Sit back, enjoy the ride and hang out with me for a little while. ( sorry, cheesy driving metaphor!)

  Miley Cyrus

  Sorry, Cheesy, Littles

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• I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.

  David Byrne

  Song, Believe, Design

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• Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying. "Green wood," I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it.

  Megan Whalen Turner

  Kings, Men, Fire

  Megan Whalen Turner (2010). “A Conspiracy of Kings”, Greenwillow

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• But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ship s sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

  John Green

  Mean, Roots, Long

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.301, A&C Black

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• For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

  George Eliot

  Light, Graves, Our Thoughts

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch”, p.92, Booklassic

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• The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)

  Joseph Campbell

  Men, Garden, Thinking

  Joseph Campbell (2001). “Thou Art that: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.50, New World Library

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• It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, by the way, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

  Stephen Colbert

  Grandchildren, Ideas, Boxing

  Stephen Colbert's monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner, www.dailykos.com. April 30, 2006.

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• Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

  China Mieville

  Squids, Monsters, Giants

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• Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Air, Cracks, World

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• Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Thinking, Television

  Chuck Palahniuk (2011). “Invisible Monsters: A Novel”, p.77, W. W. Norton & Company

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• He looked as though I'd just run over his pet puppy (though no actual puppies were harmed in the formation of that metaphor).

  Ally Carter

  Running, Pet, Puppy

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• When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

  Milan Kundera

  Kissing, Avid, Events

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• The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Men, Hunting, Important

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• What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

  George Eliot

  Different, Results

  George Eliot (2016). “The Mill On The Floss”, p.163, George Eliot

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• We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.

  Lorrie Moore

  Twenties, Possession, Storage

  Lorrie Moore (2009). “A Gate at the Stairs”, p.263, Vintage

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• You know what’s a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up. — Tiny Cooper

  David Levithan

  Sleep, Order, Thorns

  John Green, David Levithan (2010). “Will Grayson, Will Grayson”, p.150, Penguin

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• I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

  David Mitchell

  Book, Hero, Journey

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.169, Random House

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• There's a metaphor Vincent Eades likes to use: "If you examine a butterfly according to the laws of aerodynamics, it shouldn't be able to fly. But the butterfly doesn't know that, so it flies.

  Howard Schultz

  Butterfly, Law, Aerodynamics

  Howard Schultz, Dori Jones Yang (1997). “Pour your heart into it: how Starbucks built a company one cup at a time”

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• It is no strain of metaphor to say that the love of God and the wrath of God are the same thing, described from opposite points of view. How we shall experience it depends upon the way we shall come up against it: God does not change; it is man's moral state that changes. The wrath of God is a figure of speech to denote God's unchanging opposition to sin; it is His righteous love operating to destroy evil. It is not evil that will have the last word, but good; not sorrow, but joy; not hate, but love.

  Reginald John Campbell

  Love, Hate, Men

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• Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  Life, Change, Travel

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• Flying has always been to me this wonderful metaphor. In order to fly you have to trust what you can't see. Up on the mountain ridges where very few people have been I have thought back to what every flyer knows. That there is this special world in which we dwell that's not marked by boundaries, it's not a map. We're not hedged about with walls and desks. So often in an office the very worst thing that can happen is you could drop your pencil. Out there's a reminder that are a lot worse things, and a lot greater rewards.

  Richard Bach

  Wall, Order, Office

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• Your music can be played easily and well by any half-stringed harper or fumble-fingered idiot. Not that I'm maligning your songs. It's just that they're an entirely different kettle of fish-to use a seamanly metaphor-to Domick's. Don't you judge your songs against his standard! More people have already listened to your melodies and liked them than will ever hear Domick's, much less like them.

  Anne McCaffrey

  Music, Song, People

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• Well, [bluntness in songwriting]'s a lot cheaper than therapy.... There's been a lot of things going on for the past 10 years that I just never really confronted, or used metaphors to do so. This time out I wanted to make sure that everyone knows what I'm talking about and where I'm coming from.

  Brent Smith

  Writing, Past, Talking

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• The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

  Northrop Frye

  Kings, Stupid, Sheep

  Northrop Frye (2015). “Anatomy of Criticism”, p.143, Princeton University Press

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