Quotes About Metaphor

Memories are a form of simile: when we say something is 'like' we are remembering.

Shadows fell like earth from a tilted spade.

She used to think that he was so stocky, and bull-like, but now he felt like a laundry bag filled with old coat hangers.

Your wife, she like a doorknob, ever'body gets a turn.

I hate it when people take so long to drink a single glass. IT is like putting on a condom to masturbate.

I feel like I just grabbed a big juicy worm with a right sharp hook in the middle of it.

If worms carried pistols, birds wouldn't eat 'em.

I've likened Mignolet to worse than Dracula because at least Dracula comes out of his coffin now and then. He seems to stay on his line and that's it.

An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it's often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

We called him Tortoise because he taught us.

Remember—there's only one God, everything else is metaphor.

There's only one God—everything else is metaphor.' Now, strip away all the metaphors, and what is the one single commandment common to every decent religion ever known?" "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." "Exactly. Every religion in human history has had a variation of it, but why do so few people live by it? Because of all the other crap, because of the metaphors.

Metaphorically speaking," she said with a smile, "'if' is the smallest word in the Galactic Standard lexicon, yet it stands between us and our greatest dreams. Let it be a bridge, Shigar. It's time you crossed it. I will be waiting for you on the other side.

Is it like a rust, a rheum about the heart?

Do you remember the fairy tale about the mermaid? A witch gave her legs, she could walk, but she felt like there were red hot knives stabbing into her feet all the time. That story's about us, Maxim! We always walk over sharp knives, and that's something you can never get used to. But Hans Christian Anderson didn't tell the whole story. The witch could have done things differently: the mermaid walks, and the knives stab other people. That's the way of the Dark.

As Don Everts says in his book Jesus with Dirty Feet, "Referring to the church as a building is like referring to people as two-by-fours.

Don't tell me that [broken heartstrings] hurt less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize — it does.

I'm going to be a tilting boat," he said. "I'm going to be taking in a lot of water, and perhaps I'll keel over or perhaps I'll sink." "That was quite a metaphor." "I can't talk about it straight. It hurts.

Life is like a bowl of spaghetti. Every once in a while, you get a meatball.

Along the runway, wind poured through the coat of horsetail fur, and terns, in their skirts, fluttered above the thumbnail and crochet-hook snails, and we knock-swashed up, excreting fumes of carbon fern and marrow—and in the seat pocket, in front of me, were crimped, furled buds, stems bushy with fresh thorns, and her last flagon of perfume, its glass dove alighting to seize it...

Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.