Quotes About Metaphor

A fallen blossom returning to the bough, I thought — But no, a butterfly. SDC aoyagi no / mayu kaku kishi no / hitai kana2 Green willows Paint eyebrows on the face of the cliff CAC

sakura saku koro / tori ashi nihon / uma shihon2 When cherry trees bloom birds have two legs horses four

a flying squirrel sits chewing on a bird withered field (Yosa Buson`s farewell haiku)

Some metaphors are more real than the people you see walking down the street.

The body, lady, is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always...

The E.U. without Britain is like fish without chips.

I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes... I can't do it, so why bother trying?

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.

Most songwriters who have been lucky enough to have their song on the radio or be heard widely don't know anything about science. The best songs have a strong dose of metaphor. Most songs about science don't have that. Like 'She Blinded Me With Science.' It's a stupid song, no offense to Thomas Dolby.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.

Me writing about tennis is like a baker baking bread.

The term 'breakout' always makes me think of an inmate or some butterfly emerging out of a cocoon.

I'm fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound: a sound that won't dissipate over time. Essentially, the opposite of a piano, because the notes never fade. I suppose, in literary terms, it would be like a metaphor for eternity.

I'm terrified of the ocean. I think it's beautiful and magical, but I never go in. That deep, dark water, with no understanding of what goes on behind it - I think that's a metaphor for a lot of things.

Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Highly creative people have a gift for connecting supposedly unrelated elements and ideas. They cross borders without regard for customs posts or No Trespassing signs. They throw suspension bridges across great distances. These elegant and unexpected combinations flow together beautifully in the twilight zone, where metaphor and resemblance rules in place of logic and classification.

Sport is a wonderful metaphor for life. Of all the sports that I played - skiing, baseball, fishing - there is no greater example than golf, because you're playing against yourself and nature.

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates. A word fixed or a statement isolated without any decorative or 'cubist' visual format, becomes a perception of similarity in dissimilars—in short a paradox.

A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.

Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deft deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text's literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.