metaphor Quotes

“I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

“My love is as a fever longing still, For that which longer nurseth the disease; Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, The uncertain sickly appetite to please.”

“But that fig’s got roots that run deep, and it belongs in that yard as much as that oak and walnut…It don’t give up. It give up, it’ll die. There’s a lesson to be learned from that little tree, Cassie girl, ‘cause we’re like it. We keep doing what we gotta, and we don’t give up. We can’t.”

“Seasons is a wise metaphor for the movement of life, I think. It suggests that life is neither a battlefield nor a game of chance but something infinitely richer, more promising, more real.”

“If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing.”

“The sword of divine justice is every moment brandished over their heads, and ‘tis nothing but the hand of arbitrary mercy, and God’s mere will, that holds it back. ”

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music.”

“The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”

“You and I are just kids. We’ve got the best and the worst of it in front of us”

“Thoughts are just a different kind of bacteria, colonizing you. I thought about the gut-brain information axis. Maybe you’re already gone. The prisoners run the jail now. Not a person so much as a swarm. Not a bee, but the hive.”

“Sailing lower into the pale green sea, he sought everywhere for the reddish glint of her scales, until the water became dense and dark green and then everything gradually got so black he lost all sight of where he was.”

“We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.”

“While pounding on the piano keys may produce noise, removing them doesn’t exactly further the creation of music.””

“It’s like my identity’s an orbit that I’ve strayed far away from.”

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.”

“I ... feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water.”

“I’ve heard it said that the week in which a young girl prepares for her debut as an apprentice geisha is like when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.”

“The body is the garden of the soul.”

“You’re a battered heart, bleeding life in the universe of wounds.”

“It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.”

“For like as foods are threefold for mankind In nourishing, so is there threefold way Of worship, abstinence, and almsgiving!”

“I thought of myself as a free-floating one-celled amoeba, minding my own business.”

“Good my lord, be cured Of this diseased opinion, and betimes; For ‘tis most dangerous.”

″...being an amoeba and became part of the little cluster of cells in this van.”

″...tired of making circles inside a fishbowl, watching life through cloudy glass. Would I ever be Sophie la Fuerte, the strong one, a salmon swimming up waterfalls, leaping over dams?”

“And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.”

“i am really colored & really sad sometimes & you hurt me more than i ever danced outta/ i am ready to die like a lily in the desert/ & i cdnt let you in on it cuz i didnt know/ here is what i have/ poems/ big thighs/ lil tits/ & so much love/ will you take it from me this one time/ please this is for you”

“He did not rate that text at a plucked hen Which says that hunters are not holy men And that a monk uncloistered is a mere Fish out of water, flapping on the pier, That is to say a monk out of his cloister. That was a text he held not worth an oyster”

″‘Get out of here, roundies!’ shouted one of the Squares. ‘Why?’ asked one of the Circles. ‘Because this is a metaphor for racism!‘”

“All that was metaphorical has become literal, and the children are children, and the terrors are terrifying.”

“Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust... ”

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, he thought, and the wind sang its bitter black song, and not so many miles distant...”

“We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.”

“A clear conscience is a soft pillow.”

“A born king is a very rare being.”

“Pretty girls make graves.”

“Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.”

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can’t fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”

“The silence was an intense roar.”

“Trying to find a decent guy in Ruxton is like trying to find a virgin in a whorehouse.”

.. to employ a metaphor as mixed as the medium itself, defining comics entails cutting a Gordian-knotted enigma wrapped in a mystery ...”

“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.”

“When I found the train was not going in the direction I wanted, I jumped off.”

“You are not stuck in time like a fly in a closed bottle, whose wings are therefore useless.”

“I have traveled so much, I have tried much, and I have often tested the mighty. How will there still be a sun when the wolf has eaten the one that now flies in heaven?”

“David thought that if a ray of light from the sun could have made a drop of water speak, its voice would have been like the clearest notes of the violin.”

“And about this apple, how come God didn’t explain why they couldn’t eat it? He gave Eve curiosity but didn’t expect her to use it? Unless the apple is a metaphor?”

“There’s just one problem with feelings. They can be tremendously difficult to express in words. That’s the reason we so often resort to metaphors and analogies,”

“For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.”

“Countries were established, went to war, and split into smaller countries in the time it took for Elliot to answer.”

Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.