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Metaphor Quotes

Browse 2099 quotes about Metaphor.

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Metaphor Quotes

“I was running and deliberately lost my way. The world far off and nothing but my breath and the very next step and it’s like hypnosis. The feeling of conquering my own aliveness with no task but to keep going, making every way the right away and that’s a metaphor for everything.”

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Book:Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving
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“Values without action are like blueprints left rolled up in a dusty attic. This chapter is where you climb into your metaphorical tool belt and start building. It's time to turn those values into the strong, flexible protective walls of your Burnout Prevention Blueprint, otherwise known as: boundaries.”

ActionValuesGrowthSelf HelpIntentionMetaphorBoundariesPreventionPracticalBlueprint
Book:The Therapist's Handbook for Healing Your Simpsons Syndrome: Unhook from Your Inner Chaos Characters with CBT, ACT, and a Little Humor
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“Don't bother pulling my string again- Not behind those doll eyes anymore I won't say what's expected, kid, laugh at your tantrum on the floor I'm just not looking at you, kid, I'm not a piss-poor heart anymore; Not going home with the lowest bid Out of stock- your projection whore I'm never going back to the toy box Elevated up from the cellar- home of the wish-washed pretty cocks Out of the dark, preachin' Helen Keller Bored with the coin-operated allure I'm top shelf, kid, out of your reach You can't afford to walk in the store Turn around, kid, don't slip in bleach -from 'Ragdoll$ & Riche$”

PoetryGrowthMetaphorSelf WorthRebirthDollsLyricalDark PoetryConfessional
Book:Confessions of a D3AD Petal
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“Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.”

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Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“Nowadays films and television are what I like to call "Microwave Media". I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes time. Slow, precious, tempered time. A script is a film's recipe. It's just a piece of paper to the novice cook, but even a recipe needs time to be perfected before it's given to the masses.”

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Author:Solange nicole
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“Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul's income of £100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular 100,000 but a Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all of these, is not Possession the whole of the law?”

MoneyGreedInjusticeMetaphorPossessionColonialismOwnershipSocial CommentaryChattel
Book:Moby-Dick or, The Whale
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“There are times today when Rachel looks at Zach and sees an effusion, she sees him in colours of yellow and blue, sun and sky. She sees the yellow crew-neck jumper and blue jeans the boy of eight years old appeared in the day he came to Chelsea from the Coram Family via the two or three previous fosterers who returned him there, defeated, pronouncing him uncommunicative and maladroit in the extreme, animal, said one; unruly. So why this boy? For Katya the fractious? Of all the orphan boys in the world, why him? Of all potential mothers, why Katya? What did she see? Everyone has a part and a destiny. Rachel remembers the yellow jumper the boy rarely removed, even after the family shopping spree for a new wardrobe at Harrods followed by lunch in a restaurant with napkins large as small tablecloths, and heavy cutlery and wine for Katya and Lev and a pervasive daunting hush. Zach had never been to a restaurant before and chose spaghetti, because he knew what it was. He ate it with knife and fork. On the day he arrived in Chelsea, he stopped in the vestibule to slip his feet from lace-ups without undoing the bows, removing his shoes with institutional efficiency, left hand still held in Katya's right. Rachel sees that boy still, blue and yellow. Sky and sun.”

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Book:Be My Wolff
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“The Word by Stewart Stafford Though you have lost me, now you see, My prophecy to thee proved ever true, Absolving your wrongs done to me, In verdant fields of harmony anew. If I stayed, they said you would pay, In excoriating loss, I secured your sanctuary, I am the sentinel that prepares the way, Evolving beyond the dusty ossuary. Tongues with riddles lie in their reaching, By living, know your false self’s meaning, Insight doth bloom through time’s enduring, Our Spring lamb in lush meadows weaning. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

FamilySacrificeMetaphorBetrayalSelf DiscoveryRedemptionProphecyPhilosophical PoetryFamilial RelationshipsLoss And Grief
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“...this is not a book about romance or a chronicle of loss. It is a story of love rebuilt better; the story of a butterfly birthed from goo; the story of newly grown wings that beat to a higher vibration to soar in a place of unconditional love because the truest part of me has always known and just now understands that this is where healing happens and this is where healers abide.”

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Book:The Beauty in Breaking
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“I wanted to scream. When I'm with you, I feel I can take what others call my life and turns its face away from the wall. My entire life faces the wall except when I'm with you. I stare at my life and want to undo every mistake, every deceit, turn a new leaf, turn the table, turn the clock. I want to put a real face on my life, not the drab front I've been wearing since forever. So why can't I speak to you now?”

LifeMetaphorRedemptionSecond ChanceUnspokenFresh StartAndre AcimanEnigma VariationsDo Over
Book:Enigma Variations
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“There have been many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. [...] When a war breaks out people say: 'It won't last, it's too stupid.' And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn't prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people wold notice if they were not always thinking about themselves. In this respect, the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves, in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves.”

WarMetaphorStupidityPlagueWw2PestilenceGuerrePeste
Book:The Plague
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“When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic elemental events occur. And the botanist who says that the apple feel because the cellular tissue decays and so forth, is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says that the apple fell he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction... In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.”

WarMetaphorWar And Peace
Book:War and Peace
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“I feel the searing, burning of my hands, caught alight by the red-tipped fire. Silent I am, mesmerised by the flames that have now caught me in their trap. Fire is bad. Fire takes people away. Claire’s words are accurate. I am in a burning dream world. One that I may never leave. My hands and arms are now alight and my eyes are stinging with tears.”

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Book:All the Hope We Carry
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“It seems he cannot get near me, with my deep well of sadness, with my myopic awareness of the pain of the past and the severity of our family's dysfunction, without drinking from the well himself. Ten years later and my father's caught up with me With my eyes holding steady the reflection of all that happened, he looks into them and cannot deny the pain. The gift of burden I carry as the family truth teller is a token he willingly takes from me now. Where once I saw his tears as coins to cleanse me, too much time has passed for me to have remained in that purgatory. Our family's poison held as a ruby in my throat for so long now, I see him cry, but it's me who is under glass. No longer with a child's heart, his tears fall on barren soul.”

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Book:My Father's Keeper
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“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.”

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Book:Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America
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“We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever—the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgody. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen. But this was something I knew nothing of as I closed the gate and set off across the meadow.”

GoneRegretSadMetaphorThe PastEndingLast LinesA Month In The CountryJ L CarrUnrecoverable
Book:A Month in the Country
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“She has never been in the presence, before, of two people who are in love with each other. She feels like a stray child, ragged and cold, with her nose pressed to a lighted window. A toy-store window, a bakery window, with fancy cakes and decorated cookies. Poverty prevents her entrance. These things are for other people; nothing for her.”

SadMetaphorIn LoveLeft OutMargaret AtwoodVoyeurThe Robber BrideExtended MetaphorOut In The Cold
Book:The Robber Bride
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“I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life.”

LoveDeathMetaphorDeath Of A Loved One
Book:Old Man's War
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“Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.”

ReasonFreedomIllusionMetaphorThoughtLimitationSelf KnowledgeAutonomyCognitive ScienceEmbodied Mind
Book:Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought
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“I was a vase. The thought struck her as she gazed at the wall of them. She had been a vessel; it was true. She'd stepped into this shop, introduced herself, asked for a job, hoped it would fill her. And then, sitting with Jacob at the community table, she'd been a flower. Snipped from the root, quick to wilt, temporary. She'd existed to be lovely and to be chosen. No one had expected her to last. But she hadn't been a flower when she'd gone to live with Claire, had she? Emilie traveled deeper into the shop. She was in the addition now, its ceiling higher, its rows of tables laden with houseplants. Water, she decided. That's what she'd been with Claire. Shapeless, colorless, but necessary. She'd done what she had to. She had been there for her grandmother. She'd kept her family afloat. But what was she now?”

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Book:Yerba Buena
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“Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I’ll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word, I liked you from day one, and even when you'll return ice for my renewed offers of friendship, I'll never forget that this conversation occurred between us and that there are easy ways to bring back summer in a snowstorm. What I forgot to earmark in that promise was that ice and apathy have ways of instantly repealing all truces and resolutions signed in sunnier moments.”

LoveRomanceMetaphorDevotionCall Me By Your NameAndre AcimanOliver And Elio
Book:Call Me by Your Name
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“And their voices had a keenly musical quality. It wasn't that the animal people barked out literal instrumental notes or sand when they spoke. Rather, their words ignited emotional responses Nina had previously only experienced through music. When they were worried, she experienced the squeals of violins, the quick-heartbeat thrum of a thriller soundtrack. Risk and Reign's bickering had the impact of a rattling gourd and snare drum. Oli's hopeful questions were reminiscent of the lo-fi hip-hop Nina played when she studied.”

MusicMetaphor
Book:A Snake Falls to Earth
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