Quotes About Metaphor

Life is like a motion picture, everything is like a movie. In one of my rhymes I say, "My life is like a movie/Directed by King Louie".

Sadness isn't sadness. It's happiness in a black jacket. Tears are not tears. They're balls of laughter dipped in salt. Death is not death. It's life that's jumped off a tall cliff.

The cliche is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down.

Life is like an analogy.

Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death be like autumn leaves. Rabindranath Tagore What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.

A repeating refrain I wrote for Bones & Ash, the theatrical adaptation of this novel, is the spine upon which the story rests: "We take blood, not life, and leave something in exchange." In order to answer any of the questions the book raises we must take blood—metaphorically speaking. That is, we must learn how to break through the surface, find the deep dangerous place where blood flows without hurting one other, and share all that we know and love in order to survive.

Magazines were new. The Gentleman's Magazine—the first periodical called a "magazine"—appeared in London in 1731. It offered "a Monthly Collection, to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces."3 The metaphor is to weapons. A magazine is, literally, an arsenal; a piece is a firearm.

Wrote a skeptical E. B. White: "Although you can take a nation's pulse, you can't be sure that the nation hasn't just run up a flight of stairs.")

When Benjamin Franklin began writing his autobiography, in 1771, he turned the story of his own escape—running away from his apprenticeship to his brother James—into a metaphor for the colonies' growing resentment of parliamentary rule.

Metaphor is the literal language of the soul. Poets do not try "to think up metaphors." They are not interested in making up riddles for the rest of us to figure out. They think in metaphors.

Men are like roses. You have to watch out for the pricks.

A cigarette is like a hamster, harmless until you stick it in your mouth and light it on fire.

Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.

Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?" Kebes put in. "In their livers, obviously," Sokrates said.

It takes a great cook to pull life truth from poultry.

I watched that plant in the office every day. Watered it; misted it. I loved thinking about it like G.T. said, but part of me was worried the tree surgery wouldn't take. Something would go wrong and then I"d be stuck with a metaphor that couldn't go the distance.

When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.

It was Sappho who likened a girl to an apple … and compared a bridegroom to Achilles. (Orationes 9.16)

that is a Gouda.

Imagery—the core of metaphoric language—will surprise, grab, inform, and persuade your listeners as mere explanation will not. Vivid

No. Not really red, but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

The metaphors that Sumnun the Lover used to express the ineffable experience of this love, of which he was only a fragile vessel, are not taken from the vocabulary of worldly love. Rather, they are perfectly chaste, lucid, almost immaterial: "I have separated my heart from this world— My heart and Thou are not separate. And when slumber closes my eyes, I find Thee between the eye and the lid." (A 10:310)

il y a un chimpanzé sur l'autel, il se révèle ensuite être un ours.

It was like the Easter Bunny met an agent of death.