Quotes About Metaphor

I never said I could save Braddock. It's not about me. It was never even just about Braddock. It was a metaphor. Places like this matter.

I was initially planning to write about grief in terms of Eurydice and the myth thereof. By that point the overall metaphor of height and depth and flat and falling and rising was coming into being in my mind.

I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist, then one that works on your feet, your leg. But I believe George Benson is the one that plays all over. To me, he would be the M.D. of them all.

When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

I wrote a staggeringly bad poem when I was 19 after a girlfriend dumped me. I seem to remember comparing her to a tarantula. It was all very E. J. Thribb of me.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Some directors are like poets.

My wife loves elephants and compares me to a big bull elephant.

A connection between poetry and blindness is a classical trope.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

To try to convey literally what the Garden of Eden was like is meaningless. What matters is its symbolic function.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

In the previous chapter we discussed how a figure of speech fails when images are too farfetched or mixed, or when one image cancels out the other. The same principle applies to physical descriptions.

Infinito —y no histórico— es Aquiles por su cólera y su amor, independientemente de que haya o no existido; como infinito será Cristo por su impracticable filosofía, regístrelo o no la Historia. Esas metáforas, esas imágenes, pertenecen a la eternidad.

Intelligence is perhaps but a malady,-a beautiful malady; the oyster's pearl.

On the other hand, I compared the disquisitions of the ancient moralists to very towering and magnificent palaces with no better foundation than sand and mud:

He was sweet as a baby, you know? Sweet as sugar. And then he hardened. I can't 'splain it another way. He was like sugar in a jar that hardens. And after a while you take it out, and it is one rock-solid lump.

las mujeres son como las ranas, que por una que zambulle salen cuatro a flor de agua.

How symbolic the smallest things can be, the flotsam and jetsam of lives

the sweet juices of your mouth are like castles bathed in honey. i've never had it done so gently before. you have put a circle of castles around my penis and you swirl them like sunlight on the wings of birds.

This diamond has so many carats it's almost a turnip.