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Metaphor Quotes

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Metaphor Quotes

“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.”

“Art is a lie that reveals deep truths. Metaphor is one way to translate experience; symbols help us stretch our minds to finger elusive and illustrative truths. Truths are not always logical and human truth finding does not fit snugly onto the silicon chip of a computer. The rational as well as the irrational unites us as specie. We share expressible knowledge and suspect within ourselves and other people the unspeakable. The unfathomable is as much a part of our celestial humanity as is the dirt clutching our shoes, which accumulated grime grounds us to physical reality.”

“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.”

“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.”

“These poor souls. These poor pathetic souls.” The Emperor gestured toward the passersby. “I don’t understand,” Tommy said. “Their time has passed and they don’t know what to do. They were told what they wanted and they believed it. They can only keep their dream alive by being with others like themselves who will mirror their illusions.” “They have really nice shoes,” Tommy said. “They have to look right or their peers will turn on them like starving dogs. They are the fallen gods. The new gods are producers, creators, doers. The new gods are the chinless techno-children who would rather eat white sugar and watch science-fiction films than worry about what shoes they wear. And these poor souls desperately push papers around hoping that a mystical message will appear to save them from the new, awkward, brilliant gods and their silicon-chip reality. Some of them will survive, of course, but most will fall. Uncreative thinking is done better by machines. Poor souls, you can almost hear them sweating.”

“I’m stacking days, building a house of cards made from nothing but days. Monday is the Ace of Hearts. Saturday is the Four of Spades. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. Thursday night is, I suspect, the Seven of Diamonds, and it might be heavy enough to bring the whole precarious thing tumbling down around my ears. I would spend an entire hour watching cards fall, because time would stretch, the same way it stretches out to fill in awkward pauses, the way it stretched thin in that thundering moment of a car crash. Or at the edges of a wound.”

“She was to be content to weave a steady life with him, all one fabric, but perhaps brocaded with the occasional flower of an adventure. But how could she know what she would feel next year? How could one ever know? How could one say Yes? for years and years? The little yes, gone on a breath! Why should one be pinned down by that butterfly word? Of course it had to flutter away and be gone, to be followed by other yes's and no's! Like the straying of butterflies.”