Quotes About Metaphor

In baseball, you can't tell the players without a scorecard, but in political commentary, you need a metaphor.

For the Anglo-Saxons, meat was the main meal of the day, which revolved around 'before-meat' and 'after-meat.' But it has ended up as the metaphor for the most basic: 'meat and potatoes' is as far from sassy - from 'sauce' - as you can get.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike.

Sheep are never going to talk to you about cricket.

It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.

My back feels like someone beat me with a pillowcase full of tuna-fish cans.

Vidocq turns in a slow circle. "My God. It really is a room full of doors." "Thirteen. What did you expect?" "I assumed the doors were a metaphor. Each door would be a way to describe a different state of being." "No. It's just a lot of doors.

As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide.

the conscious need of the strong poet [defined broadly as the creator of new metaphors]...to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own.

a man with milk in his arteries and clabber in his veins.

I cut off my head and threw it in the sky. It turned into birds. I called it thinking.

I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth.

Finally, we should note that in the Song, the Bridegroom is sometimes called a king and the bride a queen. Sometimes he is a shepherd; sometimes they are workers in the vineyard. Sometimes they are in a palace; sometimes in the field. This teaches that people of all social classes are called to participate in spiritual life at the highest level.

Come on! Don't hold back," Christian said. "I'm not, " Lissa protested. "You are too! I've seen you knock on a door harder than you're hitting me. " "That's a ridiculous metaphor. " "And, " he added, "you aren't aiming for my face. " "I don't want to leave a mark!" "Well, at the rate we're going, there's no danger of that, " he muttered

Look who's calling the cauldron black." "Kettle. It's a kettle. Get your metaphors right." "That wasn't a metaphor. It was a, you know..." He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that's symbolic of another thing. But isn't the same thing. Just like it." "You mean a metaphor?" "No! It's like a story...like...a proverb! That's it." "I'm pretty sure that wasn't a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy." "I don't think so.

The sun crouched behind leaves, but the trees had long since walked away. The meaning that surfaces comes to me aslant and I go to meet it, stepping out of my body word for word, until I am everything at once: the perfume of the world in which I go under, a skindiver remembering air

Susan and Harry when they were young. Consumption became tuberculosis. Wasting became cancer. Malaise became stroke, blood disorder became leukemia. If anyone remarried, the second spouse hung on the wall to the sunroom, not

How come when you mix water and flour together you get glue...and then you add eggs and sugar and you get cake? Where does the glue go?

He resembled, to an extraordinary degree, an asparagus.

What's it like? Death? It's like being on holiday with a group of Germans.

Butterflies are not insects,' Captain John Sterling said soberly. 'They are self-propelled flowers.

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin.

The Hebrew imagination, we might note, was unabashedly anthropomorphic but by no means foolishly literalist.