Quotes About Metaphor

The bees in my stomach are dead and getting used to it.

He used sweet wine in place of life because he didn't have any more life to use.

His eyes were like the shoelaces of a harpsichord.

When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.

Of course they don't function as gills, but five-week human embryos can be regarded as little pink fishes, with gills.

The whole purpose of our search for a 'unit of selection' is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose.

The wolfish horror of the worst scriptural verses is cloaked under various forms of sheep's clothing: the words are not meant to be taken literally, they are 'metaphorical'.

If you push novelty of language and metaphor far enough, you can end up with a new way of seeing.

Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: 'It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.' Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.

All life is only allegory and the real story is not here...

I don't, after all, know what's wrong with him, am not even certain anything is, or that wrong isn't just a metaphor for something else, which may itself already be a metaphor. Though probably what's amiss, if anything, is not much different from what's indistinctly amiss with all of us at one time or another – we're not happy, we don't know why, and we drive ourselves loony trying to get better

Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.

Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism, Things contained more.

It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.

Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.

Hugh sought the right words. It's just that... He pushed his hair back. And then he sighed. I feel that if one is properly living life...an excess of rumination and metaphor can put you at a remove from all that's beautiful about it. If one takes advantage of all the senses - breathing, feeling, seeing... touching...tasting... he tried not to look at Lillias ...then merely being alive is poetry.

I feel that if one is properly living life . . . an excess of rumination and metaphor can put you at a remove from all that's beautiful about it. If one takes advantage of all the senses—breathing, feeling, seeing . . . touching . . . tasting . . ." he tried not to look at Lillias ". . . then merely being alive is poetry.

You kill a cockroach, Pete. You don't domesticate him.

The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons.

She seemed to be wearing frozen fish bladders for shoes. But

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

The texts emphasize that these ideas were not to be interpreted literally. They had nothing to do with ordinary logic or events in this world, but were merely symbols of a more elusive truth.

She had no children, or perhaps she had eaten them when they were young.