Best 646 quotes in «metaphor quotes» category

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

when he was afraid to changed he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there

When the devout religion of mine eye Maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires, And these, who, often drowned, could never die, Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun Ne'er saw her match since first the world begun.

When the sun touched the earth, it spread out along the horizon like a giant yolk oozing free of its skin.

When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the wall toward them.

You are nothing at all. Just a crack where the light slipped through.

Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.

Why do writers use symbolism?” Okay, so let’s say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, “I have a headache!” and other people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches.” But your headache is not a regular headache, it’s a serious headache, so you say, “My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let’s say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one’s dreams. And you can see the dream but you can’t cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier – a bay-like barrier, some would say – that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable…. So I think that’s why.

With my white friends, I’m always half Mexican. They never say I’m half Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway from the standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.

Writers give titles. Don't label a work of art you didn't create.

Wrong, and wrong agains,' he said. 'The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we seek to make sense of our surroundings, our experiences, ourselves, seeing similarities, parallels, connections. We cannot help it. Even as the mind fails, it goes on trying to make sense of what is happening to it.

Where death follows, there’s life. When darkness surrounds you in a world of chaos, search and you’ll eventually find the light.

Why would a white caribou come down to Beaver River, where the woodland herd lives? Why would she leave the Arctic tundra, where the light blazes incandescent, to haunt these shadows? Why would any caribou leave her herd to walk, solitary, thousands of miles? The herd is comfort. The herd is a fabric you can't cut or tear, passing over the land. If you could see the herd from the sky, if you were a falcon or a king eider, it would appear like softly floating gauze over the face of the snow, no more substantial than a cloud. "We are soft," the herd whispers. "We have no top teeth. We do not tear flesh. We do not tear at any part of life. We are gentleness itself. Why would any of us break from the herd? Break, apart, separate, these are hard words. The only reason any of us would become one, and not part of the herd, is if she were lost.

You know what they say about air and water when it comes to fire, don’t you?” she asks. Now, I’m curious. She hasn’t spoken for the last ten minutes of the drive. “What?” “Too much air blows out the fire. Too much water destroys it.” I nod trying to determine what she’s really comparing us to. “The idea would be to keep the flame going, right. For years?” She nods. “Like a relationship. Like a marriage.” She cringes at the word marriage. Noted. “So you need the air—to stay constant—to fan the flames of the fire, and you know, grasshopper,” I smile at her and catch sight of the corners of her mouth turning slightly upward in response to the endearment, “a hot enough fire will burn water, so you have to be careful with the water too.” “That I do know,” she says softly. “So that’s the truth about air and water.” She sighs deep. “Which is?” “It’s hard to maintain the balance to keep the fire going. You have to fan the flames without putting it out with too much water. But too little water will burn the fire right up. Too much fire. Too much destruction. We’re out of control.” “You’re talking in circles,” I say. “No. That’s us,” she says with certainty.

You. Everything else is a metaphor.

You either see it or you don't

You know how exit signs are bright and red and at times we’re blind to what’s behind? The doors are just subliminal metaphors that lead us through life. We never know, but we take a chance and open it.

You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.

Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom's Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.

You never know what’s going to be in the garden in June when you’re looking at it in January.

You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you

You're saying,' he said, weighing each word, 'that we should send Carrot away to be a duck among humans because Bjorn Stronginthearm is my uncle.

You speak in night, not because it’s night, but because it’s dark enough in theory that no one will see you.

You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a "genetic" approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. "Is that a metaphor?" I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no.

Youth is like being carried through life by a strong current," Admiral Winter said. "All you feel is the speed of the river, the thrill of rapids, never comprehending your utter lack of control, your constant peril.

A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.

You were like fine wine, but cheap wine gets you drunk faster.

50 Cent is a metaphor for "change". But originally it was a gangster from Fort Greene Projects named 50 Cent and I took the name when he passed and because he's not active, I thought it'd be cool to take it.

A bodybuilder is a sculptor who carries with him his own material.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

You were a rhyme who mattered, a being who slipped all too often.

You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.

A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.

Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

A metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.

A metaphor is like a simile.

A metaphor cannot be paraphrased

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

A single metaphor can give birth to love.

A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.

A Witch's work is mind work and utilizes powerful metaphors, allegories, and images that unlock the powers of the mind.

Be passive. In your passivity, God comes. Be feminine. In your femininity, God comes. Have you not watched it? Buddha looks very feminine, Krishna looks very feminine. Why? - because it is simply a metaphor. They have been depicted as feminine, graceful, to show that that is their inner quality - receptivity. When you are doing something you are being aggressive. When you are not doing anything you are non-aggressive. And God cannot be conquered; you can only allow him to conquer you.

Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

Economically, legally, and politically powerless throughout much of western history, women have been linked to nature and the unknowable through metaphors of the body while the masculine has signified culture and mental activity.

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

For what is the program of the bourgeois parties? A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

He looked as though I'd just run over his pet puppy (though no actual puppies were harmed in the formation of that metaphor).