Best 646 quotes in «metaphor quotes» category

Priscilla is in hell. Well, we all are. Life is torture, consciousness is torture. All our little devices are just morphia to stop us from screaming . . . We're each of us screaming away in our own private padded cell.

putriku menaiki lidah petir. membangunkan setiap raksasa malas. mengejarnya hingga sudutsudut kebun hidup. menggambar pertentangan dan kehancuran.

Regardless, the lesson I learned that day was this: tea is more than the plant it comes from. Are these 'false' teas any different from the teas of the camellia bush? If you soak them in water, will they not steep? I think tea is what you make of it, and this, there is no such thing as a false tea.

She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.

Running wild in a field of exclamations, chasing question marks

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition.

She's fascinating in the same way tornadoes are fascinating. You want to see how much they're going to spin.

She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to feel more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years. Shape-shifters lived in a world of color and brightness, of heightened senses. They felt everything more intensely, and so they lived their lives more intensely—anything to make their hearts pound harder. Life could be like a drug. But how does one wean oneself off life?

She was a candle in the night, a bright seed of heaven.

She was a mind floating in an ocean of confusion.

She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.

She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

Sandra picked up a bottle and threw it at her. Just missed the TV by a bee's dick.

She had an idea, but it was the wrong idea. It was hardly even an idea, just a white idea balloon with no writing inside it.

She loves him so much. He is her native place.

She stood there awkwardly, incapable of further theatre.

Smoke and mirrors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on to suggest that critical theories on gender, crime and intersubjectivity may offer new insights into the phenomenon.

So endeth the story of the winning of Excalibur, and may God give unto you in your life, that you may have His truth to aid you, like a shining sword, for to overcome your enemies; and may He give you Faith (for Faith containeth Truth as a scabbard containeth its sword), and may that Faith heal all your wounds of sorrow as the sheath of Excalibur healed all the wounds of him who wore that excellent weapon. For with Truth and Faith girded upon you, you shall be as well able to fight all your battles as did that noble hero of old, whom men called King Arthur.

Some oceans make sense. Most do not. Become the difference.

Snowflake’s journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly? I have no freaking clue.

Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?

Some comparisons are comparable to comparing apples and oranges’ seeds.

Some people when they see cheese, chocolate or cake they don't think of calories.

Some say you have only one shot in life, well if you get ammo, you can reload.

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

Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is--the strong horse that pulls the whole cart.

Sometimes fiction can help bring the authentic feeling of a personal encounter to history in ways that are tough to manage in historical non-fiction. I like both genres, but I've definitely read non-fiction that reads like a snake's shed skin while purporting to describe the living, moving snake.

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'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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.