Quotes About Metaphor

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Why aren't we looking at the causes of breast cancer? Why aren't we spending our energy on looking at what we're doing to the earth? On the pollutants we're putting into the earth? And the pesticides we're putting into the earth? What we're releasing into the air? Instead, we just cut off more organs! That's where metaphor comes into it - not even metaphor as much as reality.

Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous.

There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. 'Elysium' could be a metaphor for just Jo'burg, but it's also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction, separation of wealth is a really interesting idea to mess with.

People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified - in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that.

We're living history all the time, in the papers, in the news, you think about stuff and it goes into your brain and you think about it and it comes out somehow. You have an idea; you've heard a phrase, or you're angry, or something disturbs you, or something seems paradoxical to you, you explore that idea, much like a writer would explore maybe an idea through metaphor. Maybe artists use their vehicle to explore ideas, so I think the things that interest me are the kind of idea of continuous change and how nothing stays the same and it's always disintegrating into something more.

Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.

Food is a great metaphor for the consolidation of corporate power in the hands of very few, who are mostly interested in their own profits and not the wellbeing of the animals they're slaughtering, or the land and the water they're using or abusing, or the workforce they're exploiting or even the people eating it.

We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing --- discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day --- a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours--- and so's publication.

Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.

Bill Clinton sitting on Air Force One getting his hair cut while people around the country cooled their heels and waited for him, became a metaphor for a populist president who had gotten drunk with the perks of his own power and was sort of, you know, not sensitive to what people wanted.

In terms of viewing the world in a certain way, when you're talking about monsters and talking about the metaphor that you're trying to create, as Black Americans, you oft times stand apart and you have to look at things from the inside out or the outside in.

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.

When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away, took my stance away, took my strength away. I was there buck naked, humiliated, sitting in my own crap and urine - this is a metaphor. My ego had run off. Your ego is the biggest coward.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.

Maybe we need more dialogue in terms of our faith, in terms of those who are believers, or even nonbelievers, about that aspect, and what that might mean if you were interpreting. You don't have to believe it; maybe you could draw a metaphor from it.

Ghosts are a metaphor that can be interpreted so many different ways. There's no ending to what you can do. You can make it a fun ghost story. You can make it a deeply disturbing, psychological ghost story.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

I like to make people dream and think and imagine and learn and study. Nowadays, music is so literal - it's telling you, "This is how it is," and my music's the opposite. I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know.

Ghosts are a metaphor for memory and remembrance and metaphorically connect our world to the world we cannot know about.

A metaphor is like a simile.

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.

At the heart of the WTO is an assault on everything left standing in the commons, in the public realm. Everything is now for sale. Even those areas of life that we once considered sacred like health and education, food and water and air and seeds and genes and a heritage. It is all now for sale. Economic freedom - not democracy, and not ecological stewardship - is the defining metaphor of the WTO and its central goal is humanity's mastery of the natural world through its total commodification.

I was tied down in that chair for 10 minutes and experienced what it was like to be completely powerless while someone else has complete dominance. It's sadistic, even though I find Richard to be a really lovely human being. That's what the whole film "Tickled" is about. It's not a film about tickling, but I think tickling offers a really good visual metaphor for the much bigger ideas that we were trying to get at about power and control - by people who have a lot of money - over people without money and who have no power in the relationship.

Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.

We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of "how do we find our authentic selves?" And that we all - whether we're actors or not - perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?

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.

Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

The metaphor I routinely use is polar bears in the Sahara desert. You take creatures adapted to the cold and put them in the heat, the very traits that allow them to survive in one environment will conspire against them in the other. We are polar bears in the Sahara with one important distinction: we are smarter than the average bear. Once we identify the nature of the problem, we can think our way out of it. But it begins by acknowledging you didn't fail because you couldn't succeed. Because you didn't even know what the scope of the problem was. It's not your fault.

Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art.

Dr. Jeckyll & Mr. Hyde is a metaphor for alcoholism. He drinks a potion, becomes a monster. I know exactly how he feels.

Using painting as a metaphor for consciousness is what I'm interested in.

If you take a glass of water and separate it from its source - the ocean - then pour the water away from its source and ask it to sustain life, it flitters away. It just evaporates. It can't sustain life. That's a metaphor for us when we separate ourselves from our source and believe that God is separate from us.

I was particularly drawn to Berlin because of its literal, concrete division. Two halves making a whole, or two entities that were altered doubles of each other? Twins that had been separated and kept in neighbouring houses and raised according to different sets of rules as a social experiment? It was irresistible as a metaphor for division in the mind, for a split personality.

Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.

I used the physical scar of my breast cancer operation, the scar that I have across my chest as a metaphor for all kinds of scars.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

When I was developing the [TV Series "Daredevil"] idea, we were really doing something closer to what was in the comic book. By that, I mean in terms of civilians in the street knew that superpowers were an everyday matter of fact. When it finally ended up at Netflix, they really decided to land it in the Marvel Universe that exists in the cinematic universe. That changes the story entirely. It was no longer about the other, which is what that metaphor was. It's really more about the character herself, which I love.