Quotes About Metaphor

At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.

Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.

The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.

For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered in tinsel, while the trees opened our presents." "What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo. "Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?

He studied cities as women study their reflections.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Very Like a Whale

When clouds appear like rocks and towers, the earth's refreshed by frequent showers.

People are built like houses inside- they have stairwells, spacious halls, vestibules that are always too weakly lit to count the doors into the rooms, row upon row of apartments, damp chambers, slimy, tiled bathrooms with cast-iron baths, steps with handrails taut as veins, artery-like corridors, joint-like landings, passages, guest rooms, draughty chambers into which a sudden current of warm air flows, closets, twists and turns and cubby-holes, and larders full of forgotten supplies.

They agree only on the point that the most important aspect is reason. For one entire evening they play around with the metaphor of the light of reason that illuminates everything equally and dispassionately. Gertruda remarks immediately and intelligently that wherever something's brightly lit, there is also a shadow, a darkening. The more powerful the light, the deeper, the more intense the shadow. That's true, that's a little bit disturbing; they stop talking for a while.

We speak of grown-ups being "tall," but a child is "long.

Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all, it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism—it ages. Just like the cells of the body, its tiniest components, the senses, succumb to apoptosis. Apoptosis is natural death, brought about by the tiredness and exhaustion of matter. In Greek this word means "the dropping of petals." The world has dropped its petals.

[To Dr. Johnson:] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

At 11, I could say 'I am sodium' (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

When my desire grows too fierce I wear my bed clothes inside out, dark as the night's rough husk.

Humans, in order to rise above the animals, had learned how to convert themselves into nothing more than organs or limbs or even disposable fingernails and hair of a larger metaphorical organism.

calling in the Bible is a central and dynamic theme that becomes a metaphor for the life of faith itself.

Blood is that fragile scarlet tree we carry within us.

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

We are not built for mountains and dawns and artistic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount and we want to stay there. But what about the devil-possessed world? Oh, let it go to hell! We are having a great time up here.

Among the notable things about fire is that it also requires oxygen to burn - exactly like its enemy, life. Thereby are life and flames so often compared.

Saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas" - "Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses

They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.

I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.