Quotes About Metaphor

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. If anything, we use war as a metaphor for sports.

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.

... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.

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.

I hate to use this as a metaphor, but making movies is kind of like going to war. It's not - but the stamina required and what it takes to tell a story that is this big in scope, you need a general that will bring out the best in you.

I would say that the emblematic photographic image is a picture from inside a room looking out. I think this defines photography. It's the metaphor for the notion of first sight. What one saw first.

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

We approach nonfiction at a much different level than we approach fiction or poetry or drama: that there's almost no room for metaphor. We expect the "I" in any nonfiction text to be an autobiographical "I" when there is a history in the essay of the "I" being a persona.

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.

A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

The basic idea is that there is this group that, over the centuries, has learned to control reincarnation. John's character stumbles into that realization, and it's a lot closer to him than he would ever have wanted to know. It's a metaphor for when you get in a fight with your significant other and you go, "Who is this?," or you look in the mirror and go, "Why did I say that?" It's the intruder. When you threw a temper tantrum at two years old, it's them.

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

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

I 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.

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.

The point of view foreigners will have of the film The Conquest isn't the same as the French public. What will interest American and international audiences is the love story between Nicolas and Cecelia that's a metaphor of today's occidental couple, namely the women in the shadows who carry their husbands into the spotlight, but the man is so absorbed with work so the woman leaves him for another man.

Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.

The 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.

A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.

Breastfeeding is an unsentimental metaphor for how love works, in a way. You don’t decide how much and how deeply to love - you respond to the beloved, and give with joy exactly as much as they want.

Gardening is peaceful, yet there is a great element of failure. It's the perfect metaphor for life -- a lot of pleasure, then it's over. There's great satisfaction in tending something, feeling it needs you, even if it's just a plant on your windowsill.

Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.

With a horror movie, you're making a metaphor. You're making a personalized nightmare for the protagonist.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

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.

I would suggest, merely as a metaphor here, but also as the basis for a scientific program to investigate the computational capacity of the universe, that this is also a reasonable explanation for why the universe is complex.

Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can--plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language via rhythm, syntax, image and metaphor. Reading it-the best of it-can create another, very different kind of perpetual present, an awareness that can be as ongoing in the soul as the stop-time of trauma.

To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself

Clad in metaphor, the world becomes newborn to our senses, like a phoenix. It is the most effective fresh presentation of the elements of our life for our jaded, numbed, even ailing sense of imagination.

I think I've learned a lot about how to make movies, and particularly about how to edit movies by thinking about how similar problems are resolved in other forms. The issues in all forms are the same in an abstract sense, aren't they? Characterization, abstraction, metaphor, passage of time... Whether it's a movie, a novel, a play, or a poem, those issues exist. And each person resolves them differently.

Right now, I'm standing behind the glass, and I guess that's a metaphor for how my life will be going forward.

I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.

The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.

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.

The story [in 12 Years a Slave] serves as a metaphor for the fear of having your family taken away, and for being abused in such a horrific way. I lost it a lot of times watching that film, particularly when seeing the grace of the man when he finally makes it back home aged, changed, forever brutalized, and yet he apologizes to his family for his long absence. That was such a profoundly moving moment capturing the triumph of dignity over the disgraceful behavior of those involved in the slave trade.

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

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.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

Come on! Don't hold back," Christian said. "I'm not, " Lissa protested. "You are too! I've seen you knock on a door harder than you're hitting me. " "That's a ridiculous metaphor. " "And, " he added, "you aren't aiming for my face. " "I don't want to leave a mark!" "Well, at the rate we're going, there's no danger of that, " he muttered

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.

The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.