Quotes About Metaphor

We must, therefore, break away once and for all from the metaphors which depict consciousness as a luminous circle round which there is nothing, to its own eyes, but darkness. On the contrary, the shadow is at the centre.

Looking back at her – eye to eye – she offers release into a fantasy world of flight, laughter and order. Kahlo's memory, then, was of a metaphoric inward voyage, through which she found an alternative self.

Kahlo associated this formative experience of seeing her 'second self' on the window-pane of her bedroom with her adult activity as an artist, whose self-portraits also functioned as metaphoric windows, mirrors and liminal spaces of the imagination.

The deadnettle is the Punxsutawney Phil of the plant world: short of stature but stout of heart. At the first hint of winter's wane, its stem rises from the ground, and a green, grasping hand of sepals unclenches to divulge two silky-white petals, one of which unfurls straight up toward the sky.

I had seen an image of these hanging persimmons that are dried during the winter and turned into sweet, dried fruit. And I really like the idea of this very bitter, hard fruit before it's ripened - on display and slowly maturing and turning sweeter and letting its environment impact it. It felt like a very fitting metaphor for where I've come from.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word 'stimulus,' my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

Wit invents; inspiration reveals. The inventions of wit are conceits - metaphors and paradoxes - that discover the secret correspondences that unite beings and things among and with themselves; inspiration is condemned to dissipate its revelations - unless a form can be found to contain them.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Everyone has monsters and demons within themselves. They're metaphors for the human condition.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.

I played for four clubs during my career and for me it was like having four wives.

A fox is a wolf who sends flowers.

Putting Michael Gove in charge of the Department of the Environment is much like putting a wolf in charge of the chicken coop.

Well, Company of Wolves was about that literally, about fairy tales.

One hair of a woman can draw more than a hundred pair of oxen.

Women are like ovens. We need 5 to 15 minutes to heat up.

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

The South's cuisine is often likened to gumbo - a thick and bubbling melange, spiked with a little bit of this, a little bit of that - yet the metaphor, like the dish, comes from West Africa.

The flower is a jumble of thighs, the sun's harem - the most oriental thing imaginable.

Speed bumps, I was thinking, you know, you're driving along, everything's OK, and then there's a speed bump to go, 'Slow down.' Go over it real slowly, and you hit the pedal, and you keep going, and I just thought it was kind of a nice metaphor for life.

'District 9' was a singular anti-Apartheid metaphor, and 'Elysium' is a more general metaphor about immigration and how the First World and Third World meet. But the thing that I like the most about the metaphor is that it can be scaled to suit almost any scenario.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.