Quotes About Metaphor

What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon. No: it was like a blizzard. No: it was like nothing he could put into language. He couldn't face it head-on. He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.

But I like my stories to be true to life, which means there have to be wolves in them. Wolves in one form or another.

No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish.

And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling, scratch at your airwaves: no matter who I claim I am or how I love you, turn the key. Bar the window.

Acting up , a peculiar phrase. It's what people say to minimize the gravity of their condition. It implies that the offending part (heart, stomach, liver, whatever) is a fractious, bratty child, which can be brought into line with a slap or a sharp word. At the same time, that these symptoms--these tremors and pains, these palpitations--are mere theatrics, and that the organ in question will soon stop capering about and making a spectacle of itself, and resume its placid, off-stage existence.

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead them around by the nose; that is a metaphor. It's nature's way. It's God's device. It's the way things are.

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

If technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it?

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana

The best blood will at some time get into a fool or a mosquito.

There was a time I thought I was a ferret.

I was sick in my soul for that greater meaning of home that we understand most purely when we are children, when it is a metaphor for all possible feelings of security, of safety, of what is predictable, gentle, and good in life. During

Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.

The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong." So much for the Perambulating Postbox Theory.

Life is not a submarine.

grace is a small white butterfly, and life is a semi trailer careening up 101.

Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks? It doesn't matter. We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world.

la scienza discende dalla poesia, perché la metafora è alla base di ogni descrizione scientifica. Solo

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein starts shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

Life is but a dream, within a dream.

Due to their short bloom time, Sakura blossoms are a metaphor for life itself: beautiful yet fleeting. You'll realize when you're as old as me to hang on to the good times because they won't last forever.

It seems to me sometimes all beauty is dying. Which makes me hope that perhaps it isn't dead but only sleeping. And that makes me think of Sleeping Beauty and wonder if she, Beauty that is, might not be a metaphor for what is happening to the world at large: perfect Beauty born, Beauty cursed with death, Beauty dying - but with the magical hope of being reawakened, maybe by love.

I don't think you should run through life with a real erect penis. But you should approach each book - you should approach life - with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write "I don't know" one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.