Quotes About Metaphor

The spatter of raindrops made me look down at the floor. It was mosaic, a huge mosaic, made up of trillions of tiled fragments. I had heard that only if you climbed up the dome to the very top, and peered in through the skylights at the summit, could you perceive the mosaic image in full and understand what it depicted. This felt, to me, like an adequate metaphor for my life.

I see the world is flat and the map flat that records it, and both page and world speak each other forever. Put a fold in eternity and it is just as flat and wide. Take the map of the world and fold it into a boat and the boat becomes the world.

Let's say each one of these glue sticks is a wheel

She had the soft presence of a fish hook in the eye.

largely metaphorical."7 In a complex world, mastery of metaphor—a whole-minded ability that some cognitive scientists have called "imaginative rationality"—has become ever more valuable

in a time of abundance, when the largest rewards go to those who can devise novel and compelling creations, metaphor-making is vital.

right hemisphere is responsible for our ability to comprehend metaphors

It's hard to wipe your eyes when you have whirring buzzsaws for hands.

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel --movement through space --provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions --perhaps one of the secret terrors --of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister's group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose.

I force myself to outline, but not too closely, so I guess I plot by the seat of my pants? My natural instinct is to dive right in, but I know I'll get stuck. I like to stick with the architect vs. gardener metaphor. I guess I'm a gardener who plants tomatoes. I have the sticks in the ground and let the vines grow along those parameters.

Security is like virginity: you're either a virgin or you're not. You either have security or you don't.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.

A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.

Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.

Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.

In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.

Harriet: How do you practice being an onion?

The next time something happens to your car, make a note as to what you feel the broken part represents and see if you can connect it to how you are feeling at that particular moment. You may be surprised at the results. One day I will write a little book and call it Heal Your Automobile.

The night is a strawberry.

the feelings flattened and folded and turned into something else, like emotional origami.