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.

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

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

Basketball can serve as a kind of metaphor for ultimate cooperation. It is a sport where success, as symbolized by the championship, requires that the dictates of community prevail over selfish impulses.

It's a metaphor for what we're being told: "Just stay in the box, kid, don't muddy the water." Parents say it to their kids. Teachers say it. Schools do. And so people become immune to the sameness.

The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.

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.

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

I was interested in this relationship between the armed robber and the banker who were from different worlds but had similar goals. It was kind of a metaphor for this larger marriage of the banks selling off their debt and these street guys scrapping over it.

Football became my obvious metaphor as it does for many, and I began to equate this as being 'halftime' in my life. As I reflected on my professional life I realized how much time I had spent trying to make first downs and score touchdowns. My focus had now changed into trying to be more about people and serving others.

Homesickness is not always a vague, nostalgic, almost beautiful emotion, although that is somehow the way we always seem to picture it in our mind. It can be a terribly keen blade, not just a sickness in metaphor but in fact as well. It can change the way one looks at the world; the faces one sees in the street look not just indifferent but ugly... perhaps even malignant. Homesickness is a real sickness--the ache of the uprooted plant.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

When you look at the damage that many of the policies that Donald Trump has proposed can do to our citizens of the US - you can compare him to Major Storms Harvey, Irma, Maria. We're talking about life or death issues and about repealing the Affordable Care Act. There are lives at stake. Something that would affect millions and millions of people. I think it's totally appropriate. Obviously, it's a metaphor. It's not to be taken literally. But I mean that when I talk about the damage and the trauma that has been brought into our lives because of his presidency, that that's very real.

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.

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.

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 1947 Court (Everson v. Board of Education) for the first time had used only Jefferson's metaphor - completely divorced from its context and intent.

It is merely a metaphor to call competition competitive war, or simply, war. The function of battle is destruction; of competition, construction.

The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.

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.

In the simplest formulation, when we use a metaphor we have two thoughts of different things active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.

The vampire movies I embraced as a kid used vampirism as a metaphor that expressed deep sadness and a lot of human qualities.

I don’t know how you look at the inside of your head — what metaphor you choose — but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.

Tango is serious and takes discipline. It must be studied hard to be done well. It is elegant, formal, passionate and intimate. It is about power and vulnerability. It is both dance and metaphor. And to its captives becomes a magnificent obsession

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.

But in fact if you look at film as a metaphor, only through the negative can you have the positive print. What I'm trying to get to is the positive value of negation.

Depression, 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.

...a metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.

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.

The 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.

If you’re looking for a spiritual allegory in the style of C.S. Lewis, I guess you could piece something together with Lorne Michaels as a symbol for God and my struggles with hair removal as a metaphor for virtue

Sports 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.

The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.

I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.

A certain number of people have to live their lives outdoors between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., and a certain number of people can only leave their homes between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. So basically, public life has to be lived in these shifts, in order for everyone to fit on the streets because there's just no more room for any more infrastructure, any more highways. So it polarizes the community into day people and night people, and it becomes sort of a metaphor for racism and classism.

Lotus-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.

Ask yourself... If my body were a metaphor for my life, what would the message be?

Have 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.

The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.

We're still living with the old paradigm of age as an arch. That's the old metaphor: You're born, you peak at midlife and decline into decrepitude.

Sisterhood is a powerful metaphor; it ought not become a synonym for groupthink.

Shoes are money well spent and a good metaphor for life: everything else in life may be awful but a shoe will cheer me up, lift my body and take an outfit up five levels. Plus, shoes are easy to carry and fun to collect.

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.

The way music reflects real life, the way that painstakingly, over the years, what I have said is really a metaphor for what's happening to America. It used to be about, or tried to be at the very beginning, about what was right. It has stopped being what was right for America; it started being about what was right for companies that are in control.

This is a comment on fear. Today it's like 'They're going to bomb the New York subway and there's the avian flu and 50 million of us are going to die.' We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we've been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.

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

The saying "the cherry on top" is only a good metaphor if the person listening or reading actually likes cherries on top of their ice cream.