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Metaphor Quotes

Browse 2099 quotes about Metaphor.

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Metaphor Quotes

“He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.”

MetaphorCity On FireGarth Risk HallbergVideo Games
Book:City on Fire
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“He wouldn't tell me that I always have two options—You can choose how you feel or you you can let your feelings choose you because maybe it is true that those were the options that my husband had, but I knew I didn't have those options and I hated for someone to tell me that I had options I didn't have because I knew that my mind was a small object for sale and my feelings could pick me up and own me and maybe my husband was too expensive for feelings to choose him, to pick him up and have him rung up and scanned and bagged and taken along with those feelings, feelings of I can't really get out of bed today and Husband, would you please not talk to me for the rest of the year. I, too often, had my face smashed against concrete curbs of Ruby, memories of Ruby, the way her face had looked that afternoon as she curled in that chair by the window and the light streaming in and the dark streaming out and what happened so soon after—I went around hostage to those memories, an invisible person following me with a gun barrel to my back.”

MemoriesDepressionThoughtsMetaphorMental IllnessLack Of UnderstandingStream Of ConsciousnessPatronizingCatherine LaceyBad AdviceNobody Is Ever Missing
Book:Nobody Is Ever Missing
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“Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.”

MetaphorMental IllnessDisconnectedCatherine LaceyRemovedNobody Is Ever MissingNothing To Give
Book:Nobody Is Ever Missing
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“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.”

NatureSkyMetaphorDawnImageryConstellationsNight SkyNational ParksGrand CanyonPoetic ProseNature WritingCanyonSunrsie
Book:Downcanyon: A Naturalist Explores the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon
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“My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean.”

WomenRiversMetaphor
Book:White Oleander
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“There's a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes... but it's still the only giant peach in town. Even if it's wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.”

HumorHollywoodMetaphorCelebrity
Book:A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations
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“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.”

MetaphorPresenceNotice
Book:Everything You Say Is Goodbye
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“...you must understand that not even the Jedi know all there is to be known about the Force; no mortal mind can. We speak of the will of the Force as someone ignorant of gravity might say it is the will of a river to flow to the ocean; it is a metaphor that describes our ignorance. The simple truth - if any truth is ever simple - is that we do not truly know what the will of the Force may be. We can never know. It is so far beyond our limited understanding that we can only surrender to its mystery.”

TruthMysteryIgnoranceMetaphorGravityJediThe ForceObi Wan KenobiSimple TruthOld BenSurrender To MysteryThe Will Of The Force
Book:Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
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“- Las reses son ciegas porque no necesitan ojos, puesto que viven en la oscuridad. ¿Y sabes por qué? Porque no hay nada ahí fuera que pueda interesarles. Porque si salen de los túneles morirán de hambre y de frío. Porque en el pasado los animales que salían, atraídos por la luz, jamás regresaban, y al final los que quedaron vivos fueron aquellos que no necesitaban ver, aquellos que sabían apretujarse unos contra otros para mantener el calor. Prefiero ser una res ciega viva que un idiota muerto -concluyó, ceñuda.”

FearExperienceCuriosityMetaphorCowardice
Book:La emperatriz de los etéreos
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“They are very good odds. And I know that my scientific brain believes them, if not my panic-ridden, maternal one. Those odds should have made a difference to my reaction. I should have been able to take the diagnosis calmly, intelligently, reflectively. But that would be to assign rationality to this phenomenon. The trouble with abject fear - with searing, lurid metaphor - is that it is not rational. And the myths that spring out of fear that deep are certainly not. They are the stuff of nightmares. They are tenacious.”

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Book:Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
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“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.”

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Book:Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
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“The predominant cancer metaphor is war. We fight cancer, usually valiantly. We attack tumors and try to annihilate them and bring out our arsenals to do that, and so on. It's us against cancer. This metaphor has come in for its share of criticism within the ethical, psychological and even oncological disciplines. A main concern is that when someone dies of cancer, the message that remains is that that person just hasn't fought hard enough, was not a brave enough soldier against the ultimate foe, did not really want to win. The cancer-is-war metaphor does not seem to allow space for the idea that in actual war, some soldiers die heroically for the larger good, no matter which side wins. War is death. In the cancer war, if you die, you've lost and cancer has won. The dead are responsible not just for getting cancer, but also for failing to defeat it.”

WarLanguageMetaphorCancerIllness
Book:Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
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