Best 646 quotes in «metaphor quotes» category

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.

Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.

Sometimes it's hard to see everything going on in the garden when your nest is perched at the top of the tree.

Somewhere in the world pigs are flying, stones are bleeding, and hell has fucking froze over

So. The door was open into the dark and he had but to walk through it.

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load. She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?

Spring came down hard that year. And I do mean hard, like the fist of some drunken pike poker with too much fury and not enough ale, whose wife just left him for some wandering minstrel and whose commanding officer absconded with his pay.

Stella is a mask trying to make itself real. A bed stitching itself a quilt. I wonder if all minds build themselves autonomously out of whatever rags and bones are left lying around, and she—her original being erased or broken—is just doing what we all do, a little late renewal in her own skull.

Stretched and skewed Tap of the 8-ball and the cue Scratches fall through They are the scars of you

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world…concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects.

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization." -Vergere

Suddenly they were both leaping around him, shouting 'Traitor!' and 'Thought-criminal!', the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gamboling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

Teddy shuddered. The idea of the sublime little bird being plucked from the sky, of its exquisite song being interrupted in full flight, was horrible to him.

That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?

That’s the only thing you can do with a mess. Start cleaning it up, a little at a time.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

Sometimes the clouds inside my head get big and gray and swirly and then I hurricane through my eyes.

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

The armored infantry was Santa Claus, the battle was out Christmas. What else for the elves to do on Christmas Eve but to let their hair down and drink a a little eggnog.

The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn't have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what's commonly referred to as reality.

The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.

The clouds turned from pink to grey and that very metaphor defined my life in that very moment.

The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing. But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.

The deer in procession resemble charcoal cave paintings rendered manifest. Art's magic working backwards. The chalk behind them, bone. And not the hare runs, too. The hare runs in the opposite direction to the deer. The animals runs, and the landscape seems then to be parting in front of me. Deer one way, hare the other. And now they are quite gone: the hare to the fieldmargin at the top of the hill to my left, the deer into the wood at the top of the hill to my right. There is nothing before me now but wind and chalk and wheat.

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.

The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, “Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear.

The flirty old moon eased his way across the warped and sooty floorboards and kissed my bare toes, turning my feet as luminous as the skin of cinema stars.

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world... Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.

The hope in her voice now made me think of a flower growing in shadow.

The horizon changes but the sun does not.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one. Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers. And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving. There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.

The kingdom of God is a metaphor of transformation into more creative, more conscious, more caring, loving and fulfilling life with the fellow beings.

The last hour waiting patiently on a tray for her somewhere in the future. The spoon slipping quietly into the beautiful soup.

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa's fate was too heavy to carry up there, and I learned to leave it below, somewhere on the ground floor. I left the house far behind as I walked on the path paved by the books, and every evening, baby Mangalam slept soundly on the bed I made for her on the window seat.

The light of the sun is the manifestation of the clarity of the sky; and the sky is the basic condition necessary for the manifestation of the sun's light. So, too, in the sky two, three, four, or any number of suns could arise; but the sky always remains indivisibly one sky. Similarly, every individual's state of presence is unique and distinct, but the void nature of the individual is universal, and common to all beings.

The man's emotions flowed back and forth like waves of the sea.

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity, and meaningfulness of ordinary experiences becomes the basis of a passionate spirituality. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor: The Supreme Being. The Prime Mover. The Creator. The Almighty. The Father. The King of Kings. Shepherd. Potter. Lawgiver. Judge. Mother. Lover. Breath. The vehicle by which we are moved in passionate spirituality is metaphor. The mechanism of such metaphor is bodily. It is a neural mechanism that recruits our abilities to perceive, to move, to feel, and to envision in the service not only of theoretical and philosophical thought, but of spiritual experience.

The bad parts of the statute are not judicially severable, I consider, from the rest of its provisions that deal with imprisonment. Their roots are entangled too tenaciously in the surrounding soil for a clean extraction to be feasible. The conclusion to which I accordingly come is that we are left with no option but to declare those provisions as a whole to be constitutionally invalid on account of their objectionable overbreadth.

The morning Mom tells me my skirt is too short, I find the lawn full of dead fledglings.

The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.

The HBS logo shone high above, a surrogate sun for the overcast day.

The night had a nearly liquid quality, was like sliding into a warm swimming pool, a pool filled with buoyant darkenss instead of water.

The point is that if you think you can pinpoint the cause, then you can fool yourself into thinking you can avert the cause. It's deeply egotistical. It's life played as a grand insurance policy. Our myth-making around cancer stems from the same impulse. Because we don't know exactly why most of it happens, we weave a makeshift wisdom around it, a false prophet, which seeps into the common story and feeds our hunger to understand why. The guilt is a byproduct, a way to assign blame and seek absolution. It's a lesser evil than the forces of randomness. And it gives us the illusion of control.