Quotes About Metaphor

But "redemption" in the Bible and in Paul is not about the forgiveness of sins. Rather, it is a metaphor of liberation from bondage—from life in Egypt, from a life of slavery. "The redemption that is in Christ Jesus" would be better translated "the liberation that is in Christ Jesus." We are liberated through him.

He points beyond himself to God—to God's character and passion. This is the meaning of our christological language and our credal affirmations about Jesus: in this person we see the revelation of God, the heart of God. He is both metaphor and sacrament of God.

But I do see the phrase "kingdom of God" as central to Jesus. As I have argued elsewhere, I see it as a metaphor or symbol with a range of meanings rather than as a concept with a single meaning. In the message and activity of Jesus, its meanings include the following.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words.

An analogy says that A is to B as C is to D. A metaphor says that A is B, or substitutes B for A. A simile says that A is like B.

The American Heritage Dictionary definition says a metaphor is "an implicit comparison." This unusual term is used for one reason, and one reason only: to distinguish it from a simile, which makes an explicit—or direct—comparison.

Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.

A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?

I could end this with a moral, as if this were a fable about animals, though no fables are really about animals.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals pg. 102.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a little. But in my visualization a plant covered with poison berries would grow out of the stone, whether I wanted it to or not.

Why are you so interested in amoebas? Oh, they're immortal, he said, and sort of shapeless and flexible. Being a person is getting too complicated.

Toast is me. I am toast.

Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.

I would like to say my hair turned white overnight, but it didn't. Instead it was my heart: bleached out like meat in water

I've often wondered," I said. "If you were an animal, what animal would you be?" She leaned back, puzzled. "I can't say I've given it any thought," she said. "Since God did not make me an animal." "Indulge me," I said. "For instance: fox or cat?" ... Obviously I was both, since—unlike many—here I still am. I still have a bag of tricks. And I'm still high in the tree.

Buttered, I lie on my single bed, flat, like a piece of toast. I

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus.

Pearls are congealed oyster spit.

Toast cannot be explained by any rational means. Toast is me. I am toast.