Quotes About Metaphor

Iconicity provides an extra layer of metaphorical structure to the poem.

There is a meta- phoric understanding of the workings of imagination that is based on motion, via the metaphor that THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING IN SPACE, and the related metaphor that KNOWING IS SEEING.

People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified - in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

I have invited our little seamstress to take her thread and needle and sew our two mouths together.

Love will draw an elephant through a key-hole.

I'm kind of like a horse: I just kind of eat throughout the day, so I'm not ever hungry.

I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It's something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.

There is this really tight relationship between horror and shame. And shame is in all of my books as the biggest monster. And horror is all about creating a metaphor for something you can't face That connection is super powerful for me.

For they wished to fill the winepress of eloquence not with the tendrils of mere words but with the rich grape juice of good sense.

Most simply, a metaphor is seeing one thing as something else, pretending "this" is "that" because we do not know how to think or talk about "this," so we use "that" as a way of saying something about it. Thinking metaphorically means spotting a thread of similarity between two dissimilar objects, events, or whatever, one of which is better known than the other, and using the better-known one as a way of speaking about the lesser known.

Doubt is a great worm in a crispy, red apple.

Working in the inexhaustible natural pageant before me, I came to wonder if the the artist who commands the landscape might in fact hold the key to the secrets of the human heart: place, personal history, and metaphor. Since my place and its story were givens, it remained for me to find those metaphors; encoded, half-forgotten clues within the southern landscape.

The greens are harder than a whore's heart

Texts are not "processed" as much as they are resurrected, and the image of reader and information processor or computer device, which often dominates current discussions of reading, seems less apt than another metaphor: the reader as necromancer.

The harbor shall be a teapot tonight!

The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stew pan and the whole fixed upon stilts.

Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat.

A fish kept in a glass of water will live forever

The thorn is one of the most cursed and angry and crabbed weeds that the earth yields, and yet out of it springs the rose, one of the sweetest smelled flowers, and most delightful to the eye.

Life's like a penis; When it's soft you can't beat it; When it's hard you get screwed. - The Fat Man, Medical Resident in The House of God

The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing but itself

I've one foot in the grave and the other on a bar of soap.

When their souls grew cold they dropped their wings to their sides