Quotes About Metaphor

her mouth was a cruel flower. "Hair

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

splinter in the butt as you slide down the banister of life

The dog who doesn't bark is about a silence that speaks; it is a good metaphor for the Pariah voice, the dog's voice, that we can sometimes hear only when it does not speak.

Artificial light attracts insects, spiritual light drives insects away."

As the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, I looked out onto America: once, the land of the free. Now, the land of the zombies.

Love is like a reptile, you cut off its tail and it grows another one." Kiss Me Judas

Of course, a first-time computer user cannot map what they see on a screen to a prior digital experience. However, their cognitive processing of any digital artifact will still be based on natural language. Linguistically associating physical-world metaphors to on-screen actions and objects allows them to participate in a human-to-computer interaction.

A bell cannot tell time, but it can be moved in just such a way as to say twelve o'clock – similarly, a man cannot calculate infinite numbers, but he can be moved in just such a way as to say pi.

Using fantasy as metaphor, wryness rather than bluntness, never escaping a certain gentility in approach

Windows 7 is like a pumpkin: handsome and plump on the outside, but a big mess on the inside. So get out your knife and start carving.

As the saying goes cut off the head of the snake another one grows in its place, so why cut off the head instead just throw the snake in a frying pan and eat the snake

Metaphor is important because to deal with, understand, and even ameliorite the fix we are now in over global change requires us to know the true nature of the Earth and imagine it as the largest living thing in the solar system, not something inanimate like that disreputable contraption 'spaceship Earth

It scares me shitless," I admitted. (The "scared shitless" metaphor derives from the physiological fact that animals in stressful situations-an antelope pursued by a lion, for example-involuntarily defecate to shed excess weight, thus speeding their flight.)

Few people may be consciously aware of the etymological origins of common words and phrases, but the essential metaphor-making process of comparing the unknown with the known is still vital and ongoing. This process is the way meaning was, is, and ever shall be made.

No one can achieve profound characterization of a person (or place) without appealing to semi-unconscious associations. To sharpen or intensify a characterization, a writer makes use of metaphor and reinforcing background-weather, physical objects, animals- details which either mirror character or give characters something to react to...The game proves more dramatically than any argument can suggest the mysterious rightness of a good metaphor.

What color is the wind? Blew.

A kenning is a metaphorical circumlocution consisting of paired nouns or a noun phrase. For example, in ancient Icelandic verse, a sword is not a sword but an "icicle of blood"; a ship is not a ship but the "horse of the sea"; and eyes are not eyes but the "moons of the forehead." Similarly, the earth is "the floor of the hall of the winds" or "the sea trodden on by animals," while fire is "destroyer of timber" or "the sun of houses.

that the unknown can only be made known through metaphor and analogy. "When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects330, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical," Lewis wrote. "We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor.

You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

You can take the vampire out of the rabbit but you can't take the rabbit out of the vampire.

Science always uses metaphor.

I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.

It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.