Best 646 quotes in «metaphor quotes» category

Human life is short, we don't exist all that much. A pale brief flicker in the dark.

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?

I am a shark. A shark who dreamed he was a man.

I am going to tell a story now, and though I've made a life out of writing words, this is the first time I have told a story. There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but the fragments of phrases that signalled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.

(aside) Oh, you are well tuned now, But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music, As honest as I am.

I believe in a metaphorical reality, but not in a metaphysical one.

I cannot hope to make you understand how the world is truly made,' he told her. 'Metaphor, then: the world is a weave, like threads woven into cloth.' His hand came out of his sleeve with a strip of his red ribbon. 'If you say so.' 'Everything, stone, trees, beasts, the sky, the waters, all are a weave of fabric,' he said patiently. 'But when you think, it is different. Your thinking snarls the fabric, knots it. If you were a magician, you could use the knot of your mind to pull on other threads. That is magic, and now you see how every simple it is. I wonder everyone does not become an enchanter.

I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.

Idols of the injury, dug in behind the least understood motor plan information. The vile abomination temporal lobes and The four loathsome memory walls and The four reasoning, arithmetic beasts are found for all behind pain and planes. Portrayed as a house, Go in, function, cause blindness from The house's hearing spirit, judgment and The court's four bronze woes and The functioning brain lobe wings, Go in, hearing and perception, I dig under door fronts, pain and plans.

I didn't know what to say. I knew I had a big choice to make. I could let it all go and try to love him, try to trust him, try to make something lasting and good. He obviously had strong feelings for me or about me. And he wasn't being so bad right now. We could build something sturdy, beautiful. Or I could try to make a dash for the door by crawling under the dining room table. There was a good chance that he would kill me later either way.

I don't think I can marry, I'm not fit for it, I'm not real enough. That's the trouble. I'm a puppet that's realised what's wrong with itself and it's horrible. I'm propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I'm propped up crying in a corner.

I don't know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.

I don't pay much attention to the distinction between fantasy and science fiction–or between “genre” and “mainstream” for that matter. For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors-which is the logic of narratives in general–over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless. We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth. Some stories simply literalize their metaphors a bit more explicitly.

i do not give a sh*t, the toilet miss me now

If a tree is bent, every goat will jump on it.

If a car can represent something, this one represents contradiction. For most of his life, my dad has been able to have any woman he wants. In response, he’s gone through as many as possible, betraying each for someone younger and more absurd. Conversely, for most of his life he’s been able to have any car he wants, too. In response, he’s remained married to this, a 1982 Porsche with a tricky clutch.

I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible." "That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave." "There is one that will drown me.

...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

I forgot who I was before the (space) suit, before gravity was ripped from my vocabulary and I mastered the art of drifting

I gave her as much as I had, but it's like the difference between a movie and a book: A book lets you choose how much of the blood you want to see. A book gives you the permission to see the story as you want, as your mind directs. You interpret. Your Alexander Portnoy doesn't look like mine because we all have our unique view. When you finish a movie you leave the theater with your friend and talk about the movie right away. When you finish a book you think. Love grew up on movies and I have just read her a book. I give her time to digest.

If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

I have been struck down before my life begins. I have already died in the war.

I have drafts about your neck on my lips like a library has shelves. It was all in vain and you were all in my veins.

I lean against my sister's shoulder. "I thought lightning wasn't supposed to strike in the same place twice." "Sure it does," Izzy tells me. "But only if you're too dumb to move.

I have looked deep inside myself, trying to detect something that might be there. But just as our consciousness is a maze, so too is our body. Everywhere you turn there’s darkness, and a blind spot. Everywhere you find silent hints, everywhere a surprise is waiting for you.

I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away. But the nature of pain is that it changes— it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too. - survivor of child sexual abuse

I left the room before I could figure out exactly what bothered me about his response. Was it the way it seemed to assume a future for the two of us? A future in which I would continue to be unable to leave this house? Was it the presumption that I was making a cake for him when, really, I had no idea why I was making a cake at all?

I look at him and my body reacts in a way that it never has before, even in the throes of passion. I look at him and I start aching so deep inside it takes all I can to think, to breathe, to speak. He’s like the brightest flame and it takes everything in me to resist its call. I know that if I give in, I’ll get burned so deeply, there might be nothing left once I come out the other side. But, god, I want to step into that flame.

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

I looked young then and my young was audacious. I lay back in those tiny dusty rooms and let the summer dusk unbutton me.

I loved you with texture. You loved with a softness. Texture brought detail, softness brought folds. Folds brought creases and creases had secrets.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex? I never have to say: "What shall I compare this to?" a summer's day? No. I have to beat the comparisons back into the holes they pour from. Some salt is savory. I live in a sea.

Imagine that the lines an actress reads are a river that runs calmly along the surface of the earth. Then imagine that the actress are the earth, and that under the earth is another river, a wilder one whose current leaps in the opposite direction, whose roar is muted. Every time the actress speaks her lines, she must offer a glimpse of the river that runs beneath: the mysterious churn of her consciousness, the lawlessness of a person's doubts or desires.

Imagine for a moment that you are the proud owner of a large house which you have spent years of your life painting and decorating and filling with everything you love. It's your home. It's something you've made your own, something for you to be remembered by, something that, perhaps years later, your children and grandchildren can visit and get a view of your life in. It's part of your creativity, your hard work... it's your property. Now suppose you decide to go camping for a couple of weeks. You lock your door and assume that nobody is going to break in... but they do, and when you return home, to your horror you find that not only do these trespassers break in, but they also have quite uniquely imaginative ways of disrespecting, vandalizing and corrupting everything within your property. They light fires on your lawn, your topiary hedges are in heaps of black ashes. There's some blatantly obscene graffiti splattered across your front door, offensive images and rude words splashed on the walls and windows. Your television has been tipped over. Your photographs of family and friends have had the heads cut out of them. There's mold growing in the refrigerator, bottles of booze tipped over on the table, and cigarette smoke embedded into the carpeting. Your beloved houseplants are dead, your furniture has been stripped down and ruined. Basically, the thing you've spent years working for and creating within your lifetime has been tampered with to the point where it is just a grim joke. So, I feel terrible for poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll, who must be spinning in their graves since they have no rights to their own works of fiction anymore. I'm all for readers being able to read books for free once and only when the deceased author's copyright eventually ends. Still though, did Doyle ever think in a million years that his wonderful characters would be dragged through the mud of every pervy fanfiction that the sick internet geek can think of to create? Did Carroll ever suspect that Alice and the Hatter would become freakish clown-like goth caricatures in Tim Burton's CGI-infested films? Would Austen really want her writing to be sold as badly-formatted ebooks? The sharing of this Public Domain content isn't really an issue. Stories are meant to be told, meant to echo onward forever. That's what makes them magical. That being said, in the Information Age, there's a real lack of respect towards the creators of this original content. If, when I've been dead for 70 years and I then no longer have the rights to my novels, somebody gets the bright idea of doing anything funny with any of those novels, my ghost is going to rise from the grave and do some serious ass-kicking.

I'm always amazed that people will stand around books for hours and only look at the spine. I think I should write a book called "the power of having a spine" - #metaphor

I'm trying to keep you safe." Safe as a porcelain bowl wrapped in cotton linen and boxed up. It would be a lie to say she didn't want to feel safe, or that Nolan's worry didn't leave her feeling warm and even a bit precious. But it also left her feeling trapped, like an ornamental bird kept in a cage, its wings clipped.

I'm going to have to get an entirely new social scene if I want to avoid him,' she said, hunting for evidence of him amongst her friends' feeds. I made a sympathetic face, but my heart leapt up onto her, beat its fists on her heart, yelled, Me Me Me!

In a field where else you found a stack of revealing nature photographs, of supernude nature photographs, split beaver of course nature photographs, photographs full of 70s bush, nature taking come from every man from miles around, nature with come back to me just dripping from her lips. The stack came up to your eye, you saw: nature is big into bloodplay, nature is into extreme age play, nature does wild inter- racial, nature she wants you to pee in her mouth, nature is dead and nature is sleeping and still nature is on all fours, a horse it fucks nature to death up in Oregon, nature is hot young amateur redheads, the foxes are all in their holes for the night, nature is hot old used-up cougars, nature makes gaping fake-agony faces, nature is consensual dad- on-daughter, nature is completely obsessed with twins, nature doing specialty and nature doing niche, exotic females they line up to drip for you, nature getting paddled as hard as you can paddle her, oh a whitewater rapid with her ass in the air, high snowy tail on display just everywhere.

I'm going to be frank, Max..." "Of course. All cards on the table." But he gave me a poker smile.

I’m going to destroy you, little man!" Sourcefield yelled after me. "I’ll rip you apart like a piece of tissue paper in a hurricane!" "Wow," I said, reaching an intersection and taking cover by an old mailbox. "What?" Tia asked. "That was a really good metaphor.

I'm like a circus standing on two legs.

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

I need daylight. But I wander in the dark.

I now warn the reader not to mock me and my mental daze. It is easy for him and me to decipher now a past destiny; but a destiny in the making is, believe me, not one of those honest mystery stories where all you have to do is keep an eye on the clues. In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics; but that is not McFate's way—even if one does learn to recognize certain obscure indications.

In my art history degree course, we did a module on palimpsests—medieval sheets of parchment so costly that, once the text was no longer needed, the sheets were simply scraped clean and reused, leaving the old writing faintly visible through the new. Later, Renaissance artists used the word pentimenti, repentances, to describe mistakes or alterations that were covered with new paint, only to be revealed years or even centuries later as the paint thinned with time, leaving both the original and the revision on view. Sometimes I have a sense that this house—our relationship in it, with it, with each other—is like a palimpsest or pentimento, that however much we try to overpaint Emma Matthews, she keeps tiptoeing back: a faint image, an enigmatic smile, stealing its way into the corner of the frame.