Quotes About Metaphors

Metaphors that have the community's seal of approval roll off the tongue so readily that, by any yardstick, they are invariably thick on the ground.

Metaphors are so prevalent that if one were to specifically look out for them it would spoil completely one's reading and listening, and thus detract from the author's purpose.

Demons are real. Since I'm not religious, I think of them as metaphors for the evil desires and impulses all humans have. A religious person can think of them as separate evil beings that can possess you. Either way, I believe they exist, lurking patiently around and in us, whispering their twisted points of view, ever alert for an opportunity. The sudden chink in your armor when you're tired, frightened, or angry. The invitation you issue in that moment of vulnerability.

But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is.

building a tower of description that was in constant danger of toppling over as more and more clauses were thrown on to it, adjectives and adverbs, bounteous, haltingly, found in pockets and pitched on, similes not spared, prepositions dangling and otherwise, metaphors

Metaphors help you boil down the complications and ambiguities of your too-long life into a picture book. They help you lie to yourself

Toys to deftly pluck up like animal crackers and deposit safely into a crate decorated with friezes of bright circus trains carrying aardvarks, dodos, swift dromedaries, baby elephants, and plastic dinosaurs. A box of mixed metaphors.

The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomenon, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors.

Of course, we all know that dying, rising again, Christ in me, hidden in God, seated in heaven are metaphors—the use of common language to grasp the uncommon, a reality too deep and thick for conventional vocabulary. Following Jesus is an inside-out transformation so thorough that dying and coming back to life is the only adequate way to put it.