Quotes About Metaphor

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

The new priest in his whitish lab-coat gives you nothing at all except a constantly changing vocabulary which he -- because he usually doesn't know any Greek -- can't pronounce, and you are expected to trust him implicitly because he knows what you are too dumb to comprehend. It's the most overweening, pompous priesthood mankind has ever endured in all its recorded history, and its lack of symbol and metaphor and its zeal for abstraction drive mankind to a barren land of starved imagination.

there were no bones in his body, only tunes, and no blood, but poetry.

One burns the dead while the other burns the living.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing on everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

A depressing number of people seem to process everything literally. They are to wit as a blind man is to a forest, able to find every tree, but each one coming as a surprise.

the mind, to borrow Hume's metaphor, 'spreads itself upon objects'.

Metaphors make connections with are not contained in the fabric of reality but created by our own associative powers. The important question about a metaphor is not what property it stands for, but what experience it suggests.

It seems therefore that our best attempts at explaining the beauty of works of abstract art like music and architecture involve linking them by chains of metaphor to human action, life and emotion. If we are to understand the nature of artistic meaning, therefore, we must first understand the logic of figurative language.

If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.

Life is a thing--if you'll excuse a quick dab of philosophy before you know what kind of picture I'm painting--that reminds me quite a bit of the beaches around Tokyo Bay

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.

At the Constitutional Convention, Elbridge Gerry had bawdily likened standing armies to a tumescent penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquillity, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

THE BRIDGE TO TOTAL FREEDOM is a journey that goes on and on (although confoundingly, in the Scientology metaphor, one moves "higher and higher"—up the Bridge rather than across it).

I want you to swallow your tongue. I want you to just gulp it down, real sudden, like it was an oyster.

She had used a simile, to explain and flatter and apologize all at once. She had written, "You're like New York City. I love to visit, but I could never live there.

There is a metaphor somewhere in the story Groucho liked to tell about an encounter with one of his most illustrious peers, W. C. Fields. Fields took Groucho up to his attic, where the astonished Groucho discovered, as he later described it, "$50,000 worth of booze up there in boxes. I said 'Bill, why do you have all that whiskey up here? Don't you know prohibition is over?' 'Well,' he said, 'It may come back.'" In

the house in horror is often the image of the body, a metaphor for the different aspects of the self, the self with other people and the self alone. the body is generally under attack in horror, and the bedroom - the place for sex, sleeping, and dreaming - is the pace of greatest vulnerability.

I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.

Jesus was best known as a master of metaphor, a legendary storyteller, and a powerful healer who communicated in signs, images, and gestures. Therefore, to understand Jesus and the Scriptures, we need to train ourselves and others not to exegete more words but to exegete images.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

You may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of Bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a lump of sugar.