Quotes About Metaphor

A metaphor is a kind o' lie to help people understand what's true.

Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.

Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real.

And the new day was a great big fish

It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

The pen is mightier than the sword… if the sword is very small and the pen is very sharp.

If he was going to be boiled for a lamb, then he might as well be roasted for a sheep.

You couldn't think about how you thought. It was like opening a box with the crowbar that was inside.

It was the kind of storm that suggests the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic.

Oh, you mean like Orpheo rescuing Euniphon from the Underworld?" said Roland. Rob Anybody just stared. "It's a myth from Ephebe," Roland went on. "It's supposed to be a love story, but it's really a metaphor for the annual return of summer. There's a lot of versions of that story." (...) "A metaphor is a kind o' lie to help people understand what's true," said Billy Bigchin, but this didn't help much.

They said that dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren't careful bits of you could rot and drop off.

It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

My father is a fish.

Understand, I was a bright and profoundly unimaginative child: Much of what passes for intelligence in children is a stark deafness to metaphor coupled with a pigheaded literal-mindedness.

The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself.

In Hong Kong, 'wonton' means swallowing a cloud.

Some call its twins berries the testicles of Uranus

Once, long ago in her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love. Sunshine on ice. She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

Once, long ago on her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love. Sunshine on ice. She warms his frost. He cools her fever.

In general, the specific words in metaphoric language are less important than the concepts that the metaphors are comparing. Critics often pay attention to metaphoric words instead of concepts, simply because words are easier to identify. It's straightforward to decide that a metaphor includes the word like and therefore is a simile. It's harder to pinpoint what's wrong with lightning that pirouettes or what's interesting about a window that resembles an eye.

all humans are given the same set of primary-metaphor building blocks, but different language and cultural groups put the blocks together in different ways. Some individuals even force the blocks together in ways that don't fit – which is the major reason we get mixed metaphors.

The 'death' of a metaphor is the loss of a connection between a metaphor and a specific word, not the loss of the conceptual metaphor itself. 'Dead' metaphors are words and phrases that were previously metaphoric, not conceptual metaphors that have disappeared. Conceptual metaphors generally 'outlive' the specific words and expressions that involve them.

On questions relating to the human condition, no single metaphor has all the answers.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.