Quotes About Metaphor

Butterflies were like alcohol. The heat of a good wine in a burnt orange butterfly. The cool swallow of rare ship-bought vodka in clear, white and blue beauties.

It's turtles all the way down.

Up through around twenty-five he'd never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand.

Plover's words were like dried flowers, stiff and crumbling, crushed flat between pages, when we'd had the living, blooming blossoms all around

Two-thirds of his collarbone, and most of his right shoulder and biceps, now appeared to be composed of a smooth, highly polished fruitwood

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.

Something essential to man's creativity, even in science, may disappear when the defiantly metaphoric language of poetry gives way completely to the denatured language of the computer.

Wise men say that time is like a river. I say time is like a river of SHIT... and as you float down that river in your little canoe, your paddles are getting smaller and smaller.

In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In SF, a trope - at least as I understand the usage - is more: science used other than literally.

Linguists have noticed that across the history of language some words start out as obvious, conscious metaphors and then slowly embed themselves in our daily usage in such a way that we're no longer aware that they are metaphors.

Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We've done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it's much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it's not only easier to use but more efficient.

I liked my father's work. But above all I liked the idea of doing something concrete and useful. Building a house is a metaphor that I like, it's at the core of my life philosophy: starting from the bottom and reaching the top.

There is no more reason why the features belonging to a picture should be distorted for the purpose of such imaginative suggestion than that the poet's metaphors should spoil his words for the ordinary uses of man.

Science always uses metaphor.

There's this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.

'Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

Metaphorical tone deafness is when people are unable to discern what is of value in something. I think I'm tone deaf to poetry, for instance. Despite having studied it into a second year of university, most of it just leaves me cold.

Toen de bewoners van Paaseiland in de problemen kwamen, konden ze nergens heen, was er niemand bij wie ze hulp konden zoeken - en wij moderne aardbewoners zullen evenmin elders ons heil kunnen zoeken als onze problemen groter worden. Dat zijn de redenen waarom mensen de ondergang van Paaseiland zien als een metafoor, een doemscenario voor wat ons in onze eigen toekomst misschien te wachten staat.

Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls fiction! . . . Metaphor should be controlled. A glut on the market would make fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous, and potentially unreadable.

The silence of metaphor accompanies the act of cruelty, as for example with the cannibalistic Japanese who moved directly from the metaphor of love to devouring that marvellous Dutch girl. Or the woman who made a present of her eye to the man who said he was so in love with her gaze. The effacement of metaphor is characteristic of the object and its cruelty. Words are left with only a literal, material tenor. They are no longer signs in a language. This is the silence of pure objectality.

One of the variants of this lethal accomplishment, of this acting-out, is the realization of all metaphors - the collapse of the metaphor into the real. Here, again, we have the phantasm of materializing all that is parable, myth, fable and metaphor. Romain Gary: 'All humanity's metaphors end up becoming realities. I am coming to wonder whether the real aim of science is not a validation of metaphors.

Opium resembles religion insofar as a magician resembles Jesus.