Quotes About Metaphor

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.

Meaning was not a pitch but an interval. It sprang from the depth of disjunction, the distance between one circuit's center and the edge of another. Representation caught the sign napping, with its semantic pants down. Sense lay in metaphor's embarrassment at having two takes on the same thing. For the first time, I understand Emerson's saying about the use of life being to learn metonymy. Life *was* metonymy, or at least stood for it.

nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

favorite metaphors. I love the image of fire, not for its seeming destructiveness, but as a natural symbol for transformation—literally, the changing of forms. Farmers, forestry workers, and Native peoples know that fire is a renewing force, even as it also can be destructive. We in the West tend to see it as merely destructive (which is probably why we did not understand the metaphors of hell or purgatory).

Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15), who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into it (Ephesians 4:12–16). Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

he just tells him to "descend" from his power position, "go away and get rid of all your possessions." Money is only the metaphor here; the real possession he has to get rid of is his ego.

All religious language is metaphor by necessity. Religion is always pointing towards this Mystery that you don't know — can't know — until you have experienced it.

Imagine jumping into a pit of boiling acid. Now multiply that pain times fifty. -Percy

My face felt like my normal face, as if that part of me hadn't transformed into a bird. [Fine, Sadie. Call me the Carter-headed chicken. Happy?]

Honestly, I thought I was going to be a kite forever, suffocating inside a little feathery prison. And he had the nerve to make fun!

I give you my heart I mean metaphorically Put away that knife

What is your view of life? You may be basing your life on a faulty life metaphor. To fulfill the purposes God made you for, you will have to challenge conventional wisdom and replace it with the biblical metaphors of life. The Bible says, "Do not conform yourselves to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God.

the grain had entered the shell (Sylvie's own metaphoric stance) and the pearl that would be Edward Beresford Todd began to grow until he was revealed into the sunshine that came before the Great War and lay happily for hours on end in his pram with nothing but a silver hare dangling from the pram hood for company. His

Dirt never slept, so neither would Frobisher until he had swept it away. He was a man inclined to a metaphor.

Listening to that woman was like licking melted ice cream off the carton.

The way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline. He'd been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy's, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.

No slouch" was okay, but "any ocean" was definitely preferable - metaphorically speaking.

Even if we die, if we have to become monsters and everyone hates us, we have to read the book because it will teach us how to avoid the alligator's jaws, the wolves who wait in the forest, the huge snakes, and how to become birds.

The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick.

the usual limits of understanding another's mind are compounded when trying to understand Lowell, a man who thought in metaphor, lived in history, and whose mind was engaged in a restless, stupendously elaborate game of three-dimensional chess. Lowell's mind was of a lurching, revising originality.

I saw that dark patch on her haunch and I knew when she was human, there'd be a birthmark in the same place. I knew what it meant for her. And I knew what it meant for me. Yee naaldlooshii. Skin-walker.

The duck swallows the worm

McMurphy tied a chunk of meat to each end of a four-foot string, tossed it into the air, and sent two squawking birds wheeling off, Till death do them part.