Quotes About Metaphor

At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.

I don't know how you look at the inside of your head — what metaphor you choose — but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.

You see, I just love analogies. Give me a good old analogy any day.

Thank you. This line of salt is the beach. And this piece of bread is a rock at low-water level.' Wimsey twitched his chair closer to the table. 'And this salt-spoon,' he said, with childlike enjoyment, 'can be the body.

Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations;

Oysters have beards, but they don't wag them.

Ducking for apples -- change one letter and it's the story of my life.

There are times when images blow to fluff, and comparisons stiffen and shrivel.

Love is like quick-silver in the hand, Sylvie. Leave the fingers open and it stays in the palm; clutch it, and it darts away.

and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.

Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.

Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast.

A bit like a preying mantis that doesn't prey—a non-preying mantis if you like.

A steel door closed and the captain was on his own again. He hummed quietly and mused to himself, lightly fingering his notebook of verses. "Hmmm," he said, "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor …" He considered this for a moment, and then closed the book with a grim smile. "Death's too good for them," he said.

Life,' he said, 'is like a grapefruit.' 'Er, how so?' 'Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't (...) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories.

I think there is a Paris inside us all.

We instinctively wave to people on trains because trains are a metaphor for being alive: countless souls, trapped together, hurtling across the landscape, with a destination somewhere in the unseeable distance. Nobody ever waves at buses.

When I started researching this book, I thought that the Internet was a metaphor for life; now I think life is a metaphor for the Internet. I'm not trying to be cute. Just as it is impossible to point to a single spark within the human brain that proves life, so it is impossible to disprove that the Internet is a living thing. It is massive. It never sleeps. And more and more, it's talking about us behind our backs.

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?

Bronze in the mirror of the form, wine of the mind.

Bronze is the mirror of the form wine, of the heart.

Kad bi svinje poletele, sasvim je neverovatno da bi zbog toga postale ptice.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.