Quotes About Metaphor

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

Physicists use 'God' as a metaphor more often than other scientists-- especially in popular writing, but in the technical literature as well. Of course, this is just a metaphor for order at the heart of confusion. A rational or aesthetic pattern underlying reality is far from a theistic God.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new and complex things in relation to the things we already know... once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.

Holding onto and manipulating physical objects is one of the things we learn earliest and do the most. It should not be surprising that object control is the basis of one of the five most fundamental metaphors for our inner life. To control objects, we must learn to control our bodies. We learn both forms of control together. Self-control and object control are inseparable experiences from earliest childhood. It is no surprise that we should have as a metaphor-a primary metaphor-Self Control is Object Control.

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in sixteenth-century Spain, which is already going through secularization, industrialization, modernization. He goes out to kill a giant, and instead he collides with this huge windmill and injures himself and also damages the windmill. I think that's a metaphor for the collisions we all have over time, as our ideas of ourselves get out of synch with the historical moment.

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the results. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed.

The war against terror is like a war against dandruff. It's a metaphor. It's not about anything.

The engine room really is a metaphor for my head, and all the things bangin' around, and I think I share that with a lot of people. A lot of memories, and a lot of hopes, and a lot of just dealing with the day-to-day. Sometimes it gets all abstract.

If there's a silver bullet in the battle to recapture Albany, it is the re-engagement of our citizens. This capital has become a physical metaphor for the isolation and alienation of our people.

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.

Many of my short fictions use theatre as a metaphor for situations in which characters find themselves estranged from the larger, uncontrollable world that may or may not lie beyond the proscenium arch.

The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.

From the beginning [of the film The Darkest Hour], [aliens] it's a metaphor for the foreigners and from the beginning of the movie, American boys feel themselves like aliens here or they feel like Russians are aliens. There's misunderstanding or miscommunication. Then when the real aliens appear, together they have to fight to survive.

Don't worry about how pretty (the story) sounds, how lilting it is, and the imagery, and the metaphor, all that. Most readers don't care. It's the people in your book that matter.

The trickle-down theory of economics has it that it's good for rich people to get even richer because some of their wealth will trickle own, through their no doubt lavish spending, upon those who stand below them on the economic ladder. Notice that the metaphor is not that of a gushing waterfall but of a leaking tap: even the most optimistic endorsers of this concept do not picture very much real flow, as their language reveals" pg. 102.

For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor.

This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.

Face, to me, is a metaphor of sadness. And I want to share this sadness. I'm not really interested whether it's an Indian face or not - that's not as important for me. But it's still important to establish the relationships in order to bring about a consciousness of our fragility.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

It's a wonder you don't see the zebra being trotted out as a metaphor for racial harmony more often.

I think that we give the impression, to carry on your metaphor, that we go a little faster than we actually do. I'm fairly lazy so I'm always interested in slowing down.

Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the commonplace.

One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now."

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

I loved the world of roller derby because I thought it was such an empowering metaphor, that you get out there and do it. It's such a rocker, athletic, capable, cool exhibitionist sport; it's about this great sort of camaraderie.

It has always seemed to me that if you could talk about your work in fully-formed phrases, you wouldn't write it. The writing is the statement, you see, and it seems to me that the poem or the story or the novel you write is the kind of metaphor you cast on life.

Anyone who is serious about jiu-jitsu should know that the ability to defeat an opponent is nothing more than a metaphor for the ultimate combat, for the most significant victories are the ones we accomplish within ourselves

Let me take up your metaphor. Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious stones, never.

Nothing is more symptomatic of the enervation, of the decompression of the Western imagination, than our incapacity to respond to the landings on the Moon. Not a single great poem, picture, metaphor has come of this breathtaking act, of Prometheus' rescue of Icarus or of Phaeton in flight towards the stars.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

I like the idea of watching the sun go down in the ocean. I've always felt comfortable about that, I like sunsets. There's something about a westward movement that seems fascinating, although the Irish refer to going West as a metaphor for dying. I see it differently.

PRETTY LITTLE LIARS works as a metaphor for our central human experience: we have no way to objectively know about anything, no way to move forward with certainty, and yet move forward we must. We stumble through life, trying to find our own way, not knowing whom to listen to, whom to trust, whom to suspect, what to believe. But in that process we discover our most authentic selves.

A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

The traditional metaphor for a spiritual investigation is that of the voyage or the journey. From this image I must dissociate myself. I do not consider myself a voyager, I have preferred to stand still.

The point at which the photograph ceases to function as a metaphor is the point at which it is free to propose an experiential model.

Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.

We live in a glass-soaked civilization, but as for the bird in the Chinese proverb who finds it so difficult to discover air, the substance is almost invisible to us. To use a metaphor drawn from glass, it may be revealing for us to re-focus, to stop looking through glass, and let our eyes dwell on it for a moment to contemplate its wonder.

I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book.

Audio virology is not a metaphor. It is to be taken literally. It maps real processes of mutation, transmission, contagion and memory within music culture.

Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence. It is your Bible, your encyclopaedia, your life story.