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Metaphor Quotes

Browse 2099 quotes about Metaphor.

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Metaphor Quotes

“The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.”

PeopleThinkingShouldTryingMeanPersonsEyeLyingForgetTalkingMetaphorPhrasesApplesPigsSkeletonsCupboardsLiking Someone
Author:Mark Haddon
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“Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.”

GivingFormArtistUnderstandingSpacePaintingExpressionDancingMetaphorCreatorArchitectureCosmosRelevantMechanicTime And SpaceDance LifePoetry And Music
Author:Lyall Watson
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“I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young woman's statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that, like the women of China with their tiny broken feet, she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she cannot handle. Anorexic women signal with their bodies "I will take up only a small amount of space. I won't get in the way." They signal "I won't be intimidating or threatening." (Who is afraid of a seventy-pound adult?)”

ThinkingMenWorldWayNeedsBodyYoungCultureAsksSpaceFeetBrokenAmountProtectAdultsMetaphorChinaTinyHandleStatementsPoundsDelicateShelterYoung WomenThreateningSignalsSeventiesIntimidatingAnorexiaSmall AmountsAnorexics
Author:Mary Pipher
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“According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

KindStillsEndsSometimesMomentsHappensLife IsNextSpeakGenerationsBrokenBirthTasksLifetimeMetaphorProfessionWoundsHolesDividesNext GenerationFixingUnfinishedShiva
Author:Abraham Verghese
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“I toyed briefly with an image someone once mentioned to me, of a village in the shadow of a twin-peaked mountain. In the morning the sun rises. At lunch it sets behind the mountain. In the early afternoon it rises once more. The cocks crow for the second time, and later the sun sets again. No. One peak. Metaphors should not be belaboured.”

ShouldBehindsMorningSunMountainShadowMetaphorVillageLunchAfternoonTwinsCrowSun RiseSun Set
Book:Signal to Noise
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“The continuing struggle was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: 'I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.' (138)”

LongEndsUseCoursesStrugglePatientMetaphorFollowingBreadTherapyMilkInstructionContinuingSourPsychotherapyBread Of LifeSour Milk
Book:IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD KILL HIM THE PILGRIMAGE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY PATIENTS
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“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”

PeopleThinkingWayMeanToo MuchGraceOne ThingPoetGoes OnInstinctMetaphorHintsParablesDiffidence
Author:Robert Frost
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“I sense the world might be more dreamlike, metaphorical, and poetic than we currently believe--but just as irrational as sympathetic magic when looked at in a typically scientific way. I wouldn't be surprised if poetry--poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs--is how the world works. The world isn't logical, it's a song.”

IfsWorldWayBelieveMightSongMagicDesignShapesFilledMetaphorPatternsLogicalPoeticIrrationalRhymeSympatheticMetaphoricalRecurring
Author:David Byrne
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“But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ship s sink, or maybe we're grass--our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive. We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”

WayLooksMeanLongStillsMatterSufferingBreakAliveThousandRootsTownsMetaphorCarefulShipsGrassStringsBe CarefulYou ChooseShortage
Book:Paper Towns
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“When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.”

IndividualEventsTasteKissingMetaphorEndlessSpotsClothingsAdolescenceCoincidenceRepetitionMiraculousTediousResemblanceUniformityMonotonyAvidDecipher
Author:Milan Kundera
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“Once, long ago in her world, a sunny day in spring was her favorite, but now a sunny day in winter delights her more. It is the perfect metaphor for their love. Sunshine on ice. She warms his frost. He cools her fever.”

WorldLongPerfectSpringWinterMetaphorDelightIceSunshineLong AgoFeverSunnyFrostSunny Day
Book:The Fever Series 7-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever, Iced, Burned
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“For every album, I look at where I'm at in my career and think of a title that kind of represents that. And for me, 'Night Train' was kind of a metaphor for where things have gone, from being on one bus with 12 other guys, pulling a trailer my first few years on the road, to now. We're out here with six or seven buses and eight or nine semis.”

ThinkingYearsFirstsLooksKindNightGuyCareersGoneSixTrainSevenMetaphorAlbumsEightNineTitlesBusPullingOther GuysTrailers
Author:Jason Aldean
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“Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".”

KnowsHumansHas BeensStillsUseLyingOrderLostMoralHeardTruth IsIllusionArmyRelationForgottenMetaphorObligationPoeticTruthfulWornTranslationsMobileHuman RelationsDecorationBeing TruthfulSensuousRhetoricalAnthropomorphism
Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
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“The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.”

WorldWayMindHumansTwoUseShowsJobsFormPoetMetaphorHuman MindPossessedPrimitiveSimileCrude
Book:Collected Works of Northrop Frye: The educated imagination and other writings on critical theory 1933-1963
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“I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

WayWantBookEnoughGivenFictionJourneyGoes OnHeroTownsShoesMetaphorStrangerMemoirAdmireMy WayTeaDullPairsPotPieFloatingWant SomethingPolishCrumbsPoniesCorkDespondencyBreeders
Book:Cloud Atlas: A Novel
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“The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.”

PeopleIfsWorldWayHelpingAbleEarthTroublePlanetsOceanEnvironmentalMetaphorObviousRuinsIslandsIsolationIsolatedHelplessEcologyEasterAnthropologyPacificPlanet EarthPacific OceanEaster Island
Author:Jared Diamond
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“Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers, and triumphs over all opposition.”

DreamFatherHouseLeftInterestRoomsCitiesTeamLove YouFootballEvidenceArmyMetaphorDefinitionsDesertTriumphOppositionThrivePrizeCelestialFootball TeamAmerican Gods
Author:Neil Gaiman
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“Bodies count, of course - they count more than we're willing to admit - but we don't fall in love with bodies, we fall in love with each other. We all know that, but the moment we go beyond a catalogue of surface qualities and appearances, words begin to fail us, to crumble apart in mystical confusions and cloudy, unsubstantial metaphors.”

KnowsMomentsBodyFallCoursesQualityFailingWillingFalling In LoveMetaphorAppearanceSurfaceConfusionMysticalCloudyCataloguesDon't Fall In Love
Book:Oracle Night: A Novel
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“Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.”

IfsMenMindHumansWellsMadeBodyChoicesNamesSpeakLanguageForeverCarSeriousClothesMetaphorCurrentsFleshPlasticFabricSurgerySurgeonsWrinklesCosmeticsMillenniumFashion IndustryTuningCosmetic Surgery
Author:Naomi Wolf
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“In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.”

ThinkingChildrenRealityProcessReligiousModernAdultsMetaphorInsightGenuineContemporaryDramaticFlashRepresentationEpiphanyUsageAcquiescenceIconographyMagical Thinking
Author:David Foster Wallace
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“It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.”

IfsMatterHandsGoalMy OwnPerfectDestinyMovementMastersArmsCallingDegreesShotsNo Matter WhatDrinkingUniversityMetaphorMiserableIndifferenceHopelessnessDomainRemindersAnticipateUnwantedIllusoryParkinsonParkinson'sLack Of ControlCalling The Shots
Author:Michael J. Fox
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