Quotes About Metaphor

And metaphors like cats behind your smile, Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride, Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?' ... There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.

The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.

The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.

Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

The suit caught light and stirred like a bed of black tweed-thorns, interminably itching, covering the man's long body with motion so it seemed he should excruciate, cry out, and tear the clothes free.

The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once said.

Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page, from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the secondhand notions and time-worn philosophies.

The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.

That's the same idea that comes to us through the German Romantics, as well as out of India. To Goethe's "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("Everything transitory is but a reference"),5 Nietzsche adds another point: "Alles Unvergängliche—das ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("All things eternal are only references as well").

The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants' soul.

Girl-Warrior was lonely For the poetry-talk of the Old Ones. They spoke in metaphor, A way of language that alerted her imagination To the presence of mystery Where there was always a light on in the mica windows Of her soul's house Where knowledge did not depend on words Of faulty human languages.

So a lot of these images are kept for – they serve a certain purpose. They can open up a moment, like that crow. It gives a place of peace. That's how we humans find meaning. We find it in metaphor. It inspires us and keeps us going.

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible to see your opponent is you …

I broke a mirror and the pieces floated to China Goodbye!

his liver was enlarged and rode across the small of his back like a hard-rubbery leech

As Nora Ephron said once: "Well, I feel terrible about the metaphor, but what can I do? It's like the whale, you know?" And

Winters in Michigan are a lot like John Holmes's penis: awe-inspiring but way too long, leaving you to wonder—after the

They know when they face the white paper for their real work that their unconscious mind is a lost continent which may give them flashes of wit and grossness and metaphorical beauty

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon ...

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism...