Quotes About Metaphor

To become a welcome vessel for the breath is to live life without trying to control, grasp, or push away. And how easy is this? The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.

Why did Erasmus[…] transform the image of a woman yielding to the temptation of an enormous storage jar into the image of a woman carrying with her a small pyxis [box] ?" Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora's Box: The changing aspects of a Mythical Symbol, p. 18

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

Don't let a suitcase filled with cheese be your big fork and spoon.

He thought wryly of the current political metaphor, "the two ends are hot and the middle is cold," a very Chinese way of saying that change was passionately wanted at both the top and the bottom of the society, but sitting squarely in the middle in many areas were Mao's bureaucrats, threatened by the progressive changes, indignant, clinging in fury to the old status quo.

Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

Traditional Blackfeet saw the natural world in terms of awe and mystery. Animals lived in metaphorical relationships to them; the creatures were other nations. Every plant and animal passed coded information to man. Part of the price western science has paid for analytical power is that it has transformed the natural world into something alien.

Humans are strongly discouraged fro comparing their lives with those of other animals. Yet everything I had experienced taught me that metaphor is the fundamental path of imagining, a first line of inquiry into the lives of other creatures that sheds light on our own.

COULMIER - He who lives in darkness cowers in the light, while he who lives in the sun radiates it. Step into the light for a while, Marquis. THE MARQUIS - Permit me to extend your metaphor. COULMIER - Be my guest. THE MARQUIS - He who sits in the sun is often blinded by it. Then, vulnerable and incognizant, he is devoured by the forces of darkness. Better to stare the fuckers in the face, yes?

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

Time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana." —Unknown (often attributed to Groucho Marx)

Time flies like an arrow . . . but fruit flies like a banana.

Great," I said, rolling my eyes. "We'll get the chance to know what it feels like to be an ear of corn as a thick cloud of locusts approach.

If clichés were candied fruit, walnuts, and raisins, the Book of Psalms in The Message would be a three-pound fruitcake.

Take shots at em, I guess you could call it a parody. But compared to D, they one-fourth from watermelon to a quarter felon, dude you a pear to me.

If you're a bird, be an early bird. But if you're a worm, sleep late.

The whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.

Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights, drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life.

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

Life is like a simile.

Not me, paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much.

All my life I've swam in the loo butterfly style.

I've been doin' drive-bys all of my life. Except the bullets are newspapers, the car is my bike.

I loved to press the shutter, to freeze time, to turn little slices of life into rectangle rife with metaphor.