Quotes About Metaphor

Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.

Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

I think 'Lost Boy' is more of a metaphor for oneself. When I listen to that song, I don't picture someone else. I kind of wrote it from a very honest place.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

The typical baseball play is a pitcher throwing a ball and the batter not swinging at it, while the other players watch. Even a home run, the sport's defining big blast, is only metaphorically exciting; a fly ball that leaves the yard changes the score but may offer no more compelling view than an outfielder staring up.

The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.

For every album, I look at where I'm at in my career and think of a title that kind of represents that. And for me, 'Night Train' was kind of a metaphor for where things have gone, from being on one bus with 12 other guys, pulling a trailer my first few years on the road, to now. We're out here with six or seven buses and eight or nine semis.

I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.

I explain at the parties that I believe knitting is a transformative and intriguing act that can change the life and brain of the person doing it, and that knitting is a perfect metaphor for life and insight into some better ways through it.

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.

The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality, it then becomes dense and masks the truth it is meant to display.

in the ancient African tradition women are the sacred key to life. They carry, then push all life into existence. They are a metaphor for wisdom. Midnight

If you asked a child riding a broomstick what it was doing, the child would answer, without hesitation: 'I am riding a horse.' For that child, a stick is a horse. It is as if by merely calling something by another name, you are able to transform it into what you want it to be. By usurping God's power, you create an illusion of an instant Paradise. And no one has yet told the infant Eastern Europe that a wooden stick is not a horse.

That is what dying is: a pull to the ground. I am thin as a shadow, yet clotted as dough, my blood as thickset as mud.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

Food in sleep shows very like our food awake; yet are not those asleep nourished by it, for they are asleep.

Or you can look further and read into it a parable, an allegory maybe, a metaphor for how people and things were loved and discarded based upon their immediate value.

The book can also be a hat.

Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water, smoke from fire—a metaphor's pure being. —(1939–2019)

Wie ein Werwolf, bloß als Stier? Ein Wer-Stier?

you can call human beings stellar nuclear waste.

playing chess against oneself is thus as paradoxical as jumping over one's own shadow.

Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with the seat missing, but it hurts.