Quotes from David Punter

All public life sustains itself through metaphor.

The term 'metaphor' itself is seen to identify a verbal process whereby two discrete objects or ideas become linked, but in a very particular way, such that, for the duration of the metaphor, one of the items actually becomes the other, and vice versa.

metaphor' itself is not a static, ahistorical term; it is not as though there is a pervasive, universal concept of metaphor which can be applied, like a template, to all ages and cultures.

Even the rose, with its traditional connotations of fragrance and purity, can appear in different situations, which underlines the very important point that metaphor is primarily contextual.

For metaphor, we may suggest, is not simply a matter of what appears on the printed page or in, for example, the work of visual art; it is rather the bodying-forth [stet] of sets of correspondences of which, in some sense, we have all, in specific interpretative communities, been aware in what we might define as a liminal way, hovering somewhere around the threshold of articulation.

metaphor is never static, and rarely innocent.

the struggle to form the new is inevitably already shaped by the metaphors by which we have come to live.

only too frequently, our metaphors are not our own.

Perhaps all play is metaphor, perhaps all metaphor is play.

Certainly metaphor is in some sense the opposite of concrete thing.

Thus, one might say, the dream can never be read literally, because its very substance is metaphor...

metaphor have something in common with, for example, the paintings of M.C.Esher, or the Rorshach blot, both of which are famously indecipherable or, at least, irreducible to a single interpretation: they can never fully reveal their own meanings because they are perennially on the point of turning into their other.

metaphors themselves are time-bound and ideologically motivated.

Metaphor thus becomes, crucially, a contested field; it also becomes visible as a weapon in the ideological armoury by means of which history is interpreted, or reinterpreted, from the perspective of the conquerer.

although metaphor undoubtedly deals in likenesses, similarity, it also deals in unlikeness and dissimilarity.

Metaphor makes us look at the world afresh, but it often does so by challenging our notions of the similarities that exist between things; how alike they are; and in what ways, in fact, they are irreconcilably unalike.

it seeks to 'fix' our understanding, but at the same time it reveals how any such fixity, and such desire for stability and certainty, is constructed on shifting sands.

The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse.

A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences ('this stands for that'), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.

A common error about metaphor is to suppose that it can be in some sense 'unpacked'. When that unpacking takes place, what is left is rarely of any value; it seems a paltry and colourless thing when compared to the metaphor itself.

Does metaphor mean something more than, or different form, or in some sense beneath, what it appears to say; or is the meaning of a metaphor precisely what it does say.