Quotes About Metaphor

I wasn't sad the way a spider isn't an insect.

figuratively jumping

A rug feels like a lion, but that doesn't mean you can ride it.

I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind.

Life is like this, and literature, imaginary conversations and true stories mingling like languages in translation.

I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, and because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind.

H]e (Socrates) thus implies that there is a parallelism between the city and the human individual or, more precisely, between the city and the soul of the human individual. This means that the parallelism between the city and the human individual is based upon a certain abstraction from the human body.

It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.

The oyster is a blob of glup, but a woman is a woman.

Across the road, tadpoles are dancing on the quarter thumbnail of the moon. They cant see, not yet.

I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.

Covers, so many covers, so many different, delectable pictures, and although, metaphorically speaking, it is the thing I hate most, when it comes to literature I always judge books by their covers. First the cover will catch my eye, then I read the back of the book, and then finally the first page.

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut.

I learned to write poetry, telling the truth through metaphor, simile, straight-forward lies.

It's their skins I'm peeling, she said. The skins of the insipid scribblers, which I graft to the page, creating monsters of meaninglessness.

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.

I think that 'Elysium' the movie is unrealistic, with the space station and everything. I think 'Elysium' the metaphor is completely realistic: it's exactly where we're going.

When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

What's so exciting and unstoppable about the horror genre is that I view it all as metaphorical exploration. It's the safe place that we, as a culture, can deal with things that upset and frighten us - the darker side of our nature.

Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. Its their way of falling.

New York is actually a pretty safe place, and I think invoking the Bronx as a metaphor for the nightmarish urban environment is no longer spot on.

Women are like elephants. They are interesting to look at but I wouldn't like to own one.