Quotes About Metaphor

A myth... is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth.

Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

Is it all right if I call you Jenna?" he asked. "If I can call you Wolf," she said. He scowled, gritting his teeth. "Could you please call me Adam?" "All right," she said. "I will try and think of you as a wolf called Adam.

Are we fruit of the same tree? No — Angela is everything I wanted to be and never was. What is she? She's the waves of the sea. While I'm the dense and gloomy forest. I'm in the depths. Angela scatters in sparkling fragments. Angela is my vertigo.

A person eats another from hunger. But I fed myself with my own placenta. And I'm not going to bite my nails because this is a tranquil adagio.

You could build a world out of need or you could hold everything black and see. You give back the lack. You hold everything black. You give yourself back until nothing's left but the dissolving blues of metaphor.

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.

The perfect tattoo... the one I believe we are all struggling toward... is the one that turned the jackass into a zebra.

It is not surprising that Spain found a need for the word duende. It is the only country where death in the bullring is a national spectacle, the only nation where death is announced by the explosion of trumpets and drums. The bullring, divided in sol y sombre – the light and shade, is the perfect metaphor for life and death, a passing from the light into darkness. Every matador who ever lived had duende and no death is more profound than death in the bullring.

You're the Nile,You're the Tower of Pisa,You're the smileOn the Mona Lisa….But if, Baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!

When life throws you a pit, plant a cherry tree.

Aion is a child at play, playing draughts; the kingship is a child's.

In metaphor we say what we mean, but we don't mean what we say. In analogy we mean what we say, but we don't know what we mean.

Een wijf met een sigaar is als een onderzeeër met een balkon.

Life is like licking Honey from a Thorn

If Oak is the sunlight filtering through trees in the woods, all shifting gold and shadow, then Tiernan seems like those same woods in winter, the branches barren and cold.

You're unwinding yourself like a spool. What happens when there's no more thread?' 'Then I spin more,' I say, carrying the metaphor. 'Let me help you,' she says, brightening. My brows rise. 'You want to make thread?

My body has acclimated, and now it craves what it should revile. An apt metaphor for other things.

people who walk around in the rain naked don't get wet: they get washed

I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.

If brandy was made out of sparrows there would soon be no sparrows.

Her body stay on top of my Summers like Suzanne.

Girl, I turn that thing into a rain forest.