Quotes About Metaphor

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

When classical architecture was revived during the Renaissance, every educated person knew that it symbolised admiration for the achievements of the ancient world. Architecture had become a metaphor for civilisation.

A metaphor carries an idea from one area of thought to another. Furniture can have feminine legs; a flower is the day's eye (daisy); an error glares at you; drinks are soft; cash is hard; our lives have a spring and an autumn.

The Modern Movement, demanding a new architecture for a new age, swept away these 'styles'. That new architecture was supposed to be metaphor-free. Puzzled viewers soon began to invent their own metaphors. They spoke of cardboard boxes, matchboxes and filing cabinets. Despite designers' outraged protestations, these boxy buildings were metaphors and had meaning. The messages they carried were 'modernity' and 'functionalism'.

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

He saw what the origin mythology said of them as a metaphor. Some choose to violate the Way of the People, choosing incest, murder, and material riches over the order and harmony of the Navajo Way. Call them what you like, Chee knew they existed. He knew they were dangerous

Speak then, dear lady. I am a field of corn." "Field of corn?" "All ears.

We quickly notice how very few metaphors Jane Austen uses...we can see that Jane Austen's works do seem to aim at establishing ' a single world of discourse' and that she is not at all concerned to 'join a plurality of worlds'. Such a 'plurality' could lead to a potentially uncontrollable proliferation of ambiguities and possible meanings, whereas the drive of her writing seems to aim at a 'single' sense ... Jane Austen aims at a total transparency...

Rubiini muuttui kuin meri. Väliin se oli vain vaalea, sitten siihen valahti ruusunväriä aivan kuin lumihuipulle auringon noustessa - ja äkkiä sen sisimmästä kohosi tummanpunaisia liekkejä. Se saattoi muuttua aivan kuin mustaksi tulppaaniksi, jonka heteinä hehkuivat pienet säkenet.

My sense of humor is a turkey, and I pull it out of the oven and baste it in reality.

I don't see how metaphorical mangoes are going to do us any good,

Want me to drop a mango on her?" Sundew offered. "You have a MANGO?" Swordtail asked indignantly. "No, you acorn. It's a metaphorical mango." "I don't see how metaphorical mangoes are going to do us any good," Swordtail muttered.

Katydid isn't your sister, little snail. She's your mother.

Sheep ain't poetical.

Undeniably, the bold actions of Patton and his tankers in Europe had been developed and rehearsed in the United States. Dubbing his desert training center "Little Libya" allowed him to turn metaphor into reality, when he drove his troops 1,200 miles across Libya to Tripoli, which he entered in January 1943.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.

If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

The emotional brain is highly attuned to symbolic meanings and to the mode Freud called the 'primary process' - the messages of metaphor, story, myth, the arts.

No one plants rosebushes for the thorns.

Every time my brain parks the car neatly in the driveway, my mouth drives through the back of the garage.

So it was a true sunrise, where the colors changed at first subtly and then suddenly transformed the heavens in a way that no other occurrence could. Short of a nuclear bomb and its towering mushroom cloud. Yet both were transformative in their own right. One side of the world was lit, the other enveloped in blackness. The bomb's kiss was for real. The sun's movement was a metaphor for either darkness descending or light arising.

What is essential here is that the act of creative perception in the form of a metaphor is basically similar in all these fields, in that it involves an extremely perceptive state of intense passion and high energy that dissolves the excessively rigidly held assumptions in the tacit infrastructure of commonly accepted knowledge.