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Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work.
Ray BradburyMy 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.
Stephen DobynsNow, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.
Edward HirschYes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.
Gregory BatesonSome burns," Clary said. "Nothing that matters" "Everything that happens to you matters to me." "Well that certainly explains why you haven't called me back once. And the last time I saw you, you ran away without telling me why. It's like dating a ghost." Jace's mouth quirked up slightly at the side. "Not exactly. Isabelle actually dated a ghost. She could tell you--" "No," Clary said. "It was a metaphor. And you know exactly what I mean.
Cassandra ClareGramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves.
Marshall McLuhanSo-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor.
Wyndham LewisI've always been a fan of plain writing. I hate metaphor-laden, heavily larded, lyrical writing.
Hank AzariaWhereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.
Claudia RankineI really loved it because it really informed his way of seeing my character and the story. If you look closely he always had this metaphor of an egg, of a little chick pecking her way out of a shell, and in one scene in the kitchen there are all these white plates on a wall and then in the middle there is a yellow plate so even that looks like an egg. And a lot of the furniture was almost sculpted in that way as well. It was really cool to see that.
Mia WasikowskaI believe people have different ways of approaching the Word. For me, it's metaphor, written by people a long time after Christ died and interpreted by specific groups. I read the gospels that aren't included in the Bible. These make me feel good about calling myself a Christian.
Jane Fonda[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.
Haruki MurakamiI love sports. Anytime I can combine sports with a film I'm a happy guy. It's such a natural fit, because sports always seems to be a metaphor for life. Always, always, always.
Dean CainFor the perception of the beautiful we have the term "taste"--a metaphor taken from that which is passive in the body and transferred to that which is active in the mind.
Thomas ReidFrom 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.
Timur BekmambetovIn literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.
Tabitha KingWhen I hear real faithful people - whether it's a real Christian, or a real Buddhist, or a real Muslim - I hear them use the language I use for a friend. So my metaphor for God is friend.
Patch AdamsSci-fi is often a metaphor. I think it's more the themes and questions that science fiction raises rather than the exact predictions that should guide us.
Peter SingerLove can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
Vivian GornickMaybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.
Sharon OldsGhosts 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.
Guillermo del ToroI can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.
Anna QuindlenA myth... is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth.
Christopher VoglerA metaphor for good information design is a map. Hold any diagram against a map and see how it compares.
Edward TufteI heard my name associated with the Peter Pan syndrome more than once. But really, what's so wrong with Peter Pan? Peter Pan flies. He is a metaphor for dreams and faith.
Mark BurnettI wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity.
Vera WangSport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
Phillip AdamsI 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.
Dawn AngeliqueThe greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
Aristotle... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
Milan KunderaDepression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure.
Jonathan FranzenIt 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.
Hortense CalisherThe beauty of string theory is the metaphor kind of really comes very close to the reality. The strings of string theory are vibrating the particles, vibrating the forces of nature into existence, those vibrations are sort of like musical notes. So string theory, if it's correct, would be playing out the score of the universe.
Brian GreeneThe swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts, donkey-carts, hand-carts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amidst the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism.
William Dean HowellsI'm not building each one character around one metaphor, so much as trying to build a heroic archetype that can be used to express the kind of metaphors that I find in each story.
Kurt BusiekThere isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.
Robert HassYou can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study.
Robert GottliebSports remain a great metaphor for life's more difficult lessons. It was through athletics that many of us first came to understand that fear can be tamed; that on a team the whole is more than the sum of its parts; and that the ability to be heroic lies, to a surprising degree, within.
Susan CaseyExerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life
Haruki MurakamiMetaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan KunderaLotus-land as it appears in 'Free Will' is simply a metaphor for an idealized background, a 'land of milk and honey.' It is sometimes also used as a pejorative name for Los Angeles, though that was not in my mind when I wrote it.
Neil PeartYou can't completely control the sport - Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature's own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.
Robert RedfordHave you ever thought about the grid of Manhattan?' It's like...a metaphor for life. You think you have the freedom to walk anywhere. But in fact... you are strictly controlled. Up or down. Left or right. Nothing in between. No other options.' Life should be like an open space...you should be able to walk in whatever direction you choose.
Sophie Kinsella