Best 646 quotes in «metaphor quotes» category

As dawn leaks into the sky it edits out the stars like excess punctuation marks, deleting asterisks and periods, commas, and semi-colons, leaving only unhinged thoughts rotating and pivoting, and unsecured words.

A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

...a small stream...sings a carefree song as it runs by your house. It is so nonthreatening that you can sit by it, look at your reflection in the water, and even wash your hands in it. It is yours, your personal stream. Yet you know that it has originated in the sea and is on its way back to where it has come from. When passing by your house, however, it is yours. You can say it is a personal moment you have torn out of eternity to keep in your pocket for yourself.

At present, when people become aware of this [common metaphorical] imagery, they tend to think of it as merely a surface dressing of isolated metaphors - as a kind of optional decorative paint that is sometimes added to ideas after they are formed, so as to make them clear to outsiders. But really such symbolism is an integral part of our thought-structure. It does crucial work on all topics, not just in a few supposedly marginal areas such as religion and emotion, where symbols are known to be at home, but throughout our thinking.

A writer without confidence is like a metaphor without something to compare itself to.

A young face, yet hard; worn from conflict and subsistence, a childhood endured rather than gifted. A face fashioned from the unforgiving earth.

Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.

...both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when they were half-full, wearing a coat of shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the creek beds, wearing down the earth. Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.

Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.

Birds shouldn't be able to find tears They are the definition of freedom

Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.

Burning is the right way to paint it. You feel yourself getting so hot, day after day. Hotter and hotter. It gets to be too much. Even for stars. At some point they fizzle out or explode. Cease to be. But if you're looking up at the sky, you don't see it that way. You think those stars are still there. Some aren't. Some are already gone. Long gone. I guess, now, so am I.

But at that moment all I could see was the wolf in the white van, so alive, so strong. Hidden from view, unnoticed, concealed. And I thought, maybe he's real, this wolf, and he's really out there in a white van somewhere, riding around. Maybe he's in the far back, pacing back and forth, circling, the pads of his huge paws raw and cracking, his thick, sharp claws dully clicking against the raised rusty steel track ridges on the floor. Maybe he's sound asleep, or maybe he's just pretending. And then the van stops somewhere, maybe, and somebody gets out and walks around the side to the back and grabs hold of the handle and flings the doors open wide. Maybe whoever's kept him wears a mechanic's jumpsuit and some sunglasses, and he hasn't fed the great wolf for weeks, cruising the streets of the city at night, and the wolf's crazy with hunger now; he can't even think. Maybe he's not locked up in the back at all: he could be riding in the passenger seat, like a dog, just sitting and staring out the open window, looking around, checking everybody out. Maybe he's over in the other seat behind the steering wheel. Maybe he's driving.

But a person can make a beautiful bed And murder you in it And that's what you did And not fuck me in it

But death was a wind too strong for that.

Boundaries help us to distinguish our property so that we can take care of it. They help us to "guard our heart with all diligence." We need to keep things that will nurture us inside our fences and keep things that will harm us outside.

But how can you be there for someone who doesn't need you? It's like trying to scale a wall without anyone on the top throwing you a rope. You just keep sliding down and eventually your muscles give out, and your energy and your will and your heart.

But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.

But karma is not in fact a material accumulation, and does not depend on externals; rather its power to condition us depends on the obstacles that impede our knowledge. If we compare our karma and the ignorance that creates it to a dark room, knowledge of the primordial state would be like a lamp, which, when lit in the room, at once causes the darkness to disappear, enlightening everything. In the same way, if one has the presence of the primordial state, one can overcome all hindrances in an instant.

But my brain winds and wends. Back and forth. Up and down. It feels like the county fair has inhabited my mind-- complete with sketchy rides, carnies, and sugar-amped kids crying over lost balloons. So loud and disorienting. I want it to pack up and move on to the next town. I want my mind to be an open grassy field again with crickets and dandelions.

But I feel myself marooned on the island of my self.

But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his cleverness a ghost, he knew where it was he wanted to lay his head.

Butt holes are like a one-way street; they were made the way they were for a reason.

But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I'd be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly.

By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel.

Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Eloise's name and lured, too, by Eloise's conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the cousin was that in this golden age of peace and ever watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across this earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off light bulbs they aren't prepared for torches and forget that wings can burn.

Charter boats are like books with no covers.

Could any State on Earth Immortall be, Venice by Her rare Goverment is She; Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd, Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed; Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure, Nor any Forren mixtures can endure; Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her Face Enchants all those whom once She doth embrace, Nor is ther any can Her bewty prize But he who hath beheld her with his Eyes: Those following Leaves display, if well observed, How she long Her Maydenhead preserved, How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell; Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel, Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree, Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie.

Because it is the hardness of the floor, and the abrupt halt in momentum, and the unyielding nature of the surface, that causes a thing to crack. Even if it is not that thing's fault. And then we talk about this thing being broken, or it needing to be fixed, and not what part of the floor has played in the matter. Never the part about the floor being a constant threat. Even if it is a nice floor. Even if everybody wants one just like it.

Culture is like the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg -”the solid state of “water.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

Compraba las colinas con baluartes, con el pecho de las palomas, con el anca de las terneras. Comparaba las flores con el esmalte, el césped a las alfombras turcas adelgazadas por el uso. Los árboles eran brujas decrépitas, las ovejas peñas grises. Cada en cosa, efecto, era otra cosa.

Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it's never taking your car out of the garage. It's safe in there, but you'll never go anywhere.

dear depression you are a swallowed island. a continental shelf of grief. an underwater prison. a fog holding the sky hostage and chasing away the blue...

Decisions are like a bicycle - they do not move you forward unless you are pedalling this metaphor.

Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon ...

Defeat winter, read a book.

Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.

Did you ever get the feeling that everything was too perfect? Like the moment was so good that something had to be wrong? Kind of like the way a fish sees that bright, shiny lure just before it chomps down and gets hauled out of water to become someone's lunch.

Determination is learning to form a habit, and never breaking it in future.

But that’s life right? It’s just a shitty hand of cards. But then maybe somebody pulls out an Ace, and somebody else gets a four, or a ten. It’s all in the draw and how you play it.

Don't stir all the warmth out of your coffee; drink it.

Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

Do you always talk in driving metaphors?" "I'm a hitchhiking ghost. It was this, or talk in Disney metaphors.

Dragons aren't good at metaphor.

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

Every book was a door; every page a new place to hide.

Every human is a school subject. This is rather a metaphorical way of saying it, to put it straight, those you love are few, and the ones you detest are many.

Everything in the world could be found in the points of contact between them: all the ins and outs of the tides, the pulsations of stars in the sky, and the running of wolves across the cold north—all part of the same rhythm. This one. Theirs.