Quotes About Metaphor

Your body is a longbow carved from hickory, her father said. Your body is a blade sharpened by tears, her mother said.

She was her mother's favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.

Even so is the Libyan fable famed abroad: the eagle, pierced by the bow-sped shaft, looked at the feathered device, and said, "Thus, not by others, but by means of our own plumage, are we slain.

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.

The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.

Still as I've said all along, you can't polish a turd.

Two surviving human beings on the entire planet, Ruslan thought, and they can't stand each other. A fitting metaphor for the entire species.

for heaven's sake, don't turn reading into the intellectual equivalent of eating organic greens, or (shifting the metaphor slightly) some fearfully disciplined appointment with an elliptical trainer of the mind in which you count words or pages the way some people fix their attention on the "calories burned" readout

Please don't worry. It's a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she's a coffee table edition...

I guess it's what you'd call a metaphor: atomic energy has made America into a superpower, so maybe it could do the same for individual citizens – that's basically the point we're hoping you can get across for us.

The fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor. For traditional indigenous peoples it is not a metaphor; it is how you relate to the real world.

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

The makara is often confused with magara, the crocodile, due to their similar sounding names. The crocodile is a metaphor for worldly attachments that entrap us. While the makara refers to the bounty of material life, the magara is a warning of the perils of materialism.

In the Ramayana many women are killed or mutilated on the grounds of them being demons: Tadaka is the first amongst them and Surpanakha is the most well known. But there are others such as Ayomukhi, Simhika, Surasa, Lankini and even Mandodari, the wife of Ravana, and Chandrasena, the wife of Mahiravana. It is difficult to digest that these are simply metaphors for wild, untamed nature. There is clearly an acceptance of male violence against women.

At a symbolic level, the forest and field are metaphors for the mind. The forest is the untamed mind. The field is the domesticated mind. The consciousness is the farmer. If one is conscious like Ram, faithful and attentive, the mind will be like Sita. When one is conscious like Gautam, ignoring the mind, the mind will be seduced by temptation. In the absence of awareness, the mind will be wild with no direction.

He hesitated. "Nothing, man. What are you doing right now?" I looked down. "Petting my snake." Malcolm laughed. "With anyone else, that would be a metaphor. Good thing I can always count on you.

Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold.

You beat the liver out of a goose to get a pâté; you pound the muscles of a man's cardia to get a philosopher.

Revelation is a "meeting" between God and the believer whereby God speaks and we hear. The "spoken word" is a metaphor containing two elements: personal encounter and the impartation of knowledge.

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it's not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court.

I must have been a koala in my past life.

When life gives you lemons, throw them at the zombies.