Metaphor Quotes - Page 38

• The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

  Haruki Murakami

  People, Tragedy, Quality

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• There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.

  John Cheever

  Alcohol, Terrible, Euphoria

  John Cheever (1989). “The Letters of John Cheever”, Touchstone Books

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• Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.

  Susannah Cahalan

  Thinking, Needs, Littles

  Susannah Cahalan (2012). “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness”, p.206, Simon and Schuster

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• Have you ever noticed that the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems is to declare war on it? We have the war on crime, the war on
  cancer, the war on drugs. But did you ever notice that we have no war on homelessness? You know why? Because there's no money in that problem. No money to be made off of the homeless. If you can find a solution to homelessness where the corporations and politicians can make a few million dollars each, you will see the streets of America begin to clear up pretty damn quick!

  George Carlin

  War, Cancer, America

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• If the Prodigal Son's a parable, and if Adam and Eve are metaphors, then maybe God is just figure of speech.

  Dan Barker

  Son, Atheism, Speech

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• Through humility, soul-searching, and prayerful contemplation we have gained a new understanding of certain dogmas. The church no longer believes in a literal hell where people suffer. This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God. God is not a judge but a friend and a lover of humanity. God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace. Like the fable of Adam and Eve, we see hell as a literary device. Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God.

  Unknown

  Believe, Humility, Judging

  "Doomed to Hell Fire and Damn-the-Nation" by Joanna Perry-Folino, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 30, 2013.

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• To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

  George Orwell

  Art, Latin, Struggle

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• Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

  Robert Frost

  Safe, World, Educated

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• The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

  Milan Kundera

  Beautiful, Memories, Brain

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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• All that is transitory is but a metaphor.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Transitory

  "Faust, Part 2". Book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Act 5, 1832.

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• Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the Faded credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

  John Updike

  Doors, Age, Events

  John Updike (2012). “Telephone Poles and Other Poems”, p.86, Knopf

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• The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.

  Margaret Atwood

  Real, Optimistic, People

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• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

  George Orwell

  Cutting, Thinking, Passive Voice

  George Orwell (1953). “Shooting an Elephant: And Other Essays”

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• If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Opposites, Water, Gold

  Rebecca Solnit (2008). “Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics”, p.124, Univ of California Press

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• But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

  Haruki Murakami

  Helping

  "Kafka On The Shore". Book by Haruki Murakami, www.newyorker.com. 2002.

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• In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

  Toni Morrison

  Art, Discipline, Imagination

  Sula (1973)

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• So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

  Derrick Jensen

  Rocks, Views, Rivers

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay (2011). “What We Leave Behind”, p.274, Seven Stories Press

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• ... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

  Milan Kundera

  Character, Thinking, People

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• I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)

  Mary Pipher

  Men, Thinking, Feet

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• The continuing struggle was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: 'I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.' (138)

  Sheldon B. Kopp

  Struggle, Bread Of Life, Sour Milk

  SHELDON B KOPP (1972). “IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD KILL HIM THE PILGRIMAGE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY PATIENTS”

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• For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Wall, Loneliness, Men

  Carlos Castaneda (1991). “Journey To Ixtlan”, p.267, Simon and Schuster

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• There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Religious, Atheist

  Joseph Campbell (2010). “Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.75, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, World, Want

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• For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Distance, Mean

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Jun 03, 2015

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• There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

  Jennifer Egan

  Way

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