Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.

Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.

Anger has been ready to be angry.

How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.

When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.