Quotes About Metaphor

Then there's Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended . . .

To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird's sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door.

The square root of I is I.

V.V. sought to express something, which until expressed had only a twilight being (or even none at all--nothing but the illusion of the backward shadow of its imminent expression). It was Ada's castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterful or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time.

I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.

We live in a stocking which is in the process of being turned inside out, without our ever knowing for sure to what phase of the process our moment of consciousness corresponds.

Tropes are the dreams of speech.

Sleep is a rose, as the Persians say.

Eis aqui, pois, a minha história. Eu a reli. Ela contém fragmentos de medula - e sangue, e belas e brilhantes moscas azuis. Neste ou naquele de seus volteios sinto que o meu escorregadio 'eu' me foge, deslizando para águas mais profundas e negras do que aquelas que me interessa perscrutar.

Lafontaine was wrong: Dead is the mandible, alive the song.

Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree

We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.

You talk about love the same way my patients talk about cancer.

It's kind of like the chicken or the leg," Kate said.

Schopenhauer writes about marriage. He says getting married is like grasping blind into a sack of snakes and hoping to find an eel.

Men are like a deck of cards. You'll find the occasional king, but most are jacks.

I suppose she's right. It's like a metaphor for life: No one wants an ornery old goat, but we can't resist opening the door ayway. We can't keep from hoping.

Tales and images transcend duality.

The little bird in his throat had died and swelled so that he could hardly breathe.

Metaphor is the currency of knowledge. I have spent my life learning incredible amounts of disparate, disconnected, obscure, useless pieces of knowledge, and they have turned out to be, almost all of them, extremely useful.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

Making love to him was like going through a car wash, except you came out dirtier and more alive at the other end.

I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.