Quotes About Metaphor

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.

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.

They [Fairy Tales] are talking about real emotions, telling true stories, through the medium of metaphor. People used to understand metaphor better than I think we do now. But these stories are so potent, they refuse to die.

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.

Flower was a good metaphor for growth. The song is obviously about sexual responsibility, so that was the main metaphor. Also, it's like knowing who someone has been and remembering and appreciating that, but really appreciating what they are now even more.

Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth, and these are two kinds of generic givens of life, if you look at it poetically, biblically, the idea of the life of beings, of man, being transitory, the earth abides-ashes to ashes, dust to dust-man returns to earth, grows out of earth like a flower, wilts, goes back to the earth... We are frail, transitory creatures with aspirations of immortality, conscious of our inevitable death, and we have to deal with it somehow.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

Gramophone 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.

I'm bored with DJs. Anybody that puts the title DJ in front of their name immediately turns me off. I prefer the term "sampling," because it has both the dilettante side, like someone tasting wine or caviar, but also functions as a kind of litmus paper dipped into culture. And the whole semi-legality of sampling is very interesting as well. So a DJ is not really creative enough for me to be an appropriate metaphor.

It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react.

It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... spreading DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. ... It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.

That's the secret of 'True Blood' - all the creatures that roam Bon Temps become a metaphor for our insatiable lusts and inner desires. Humans craving what they can't have and those secret appetites transforming them into beasts, or even killers.

Seeing sound, the high order stuff that's not audible still affects how everything else behaves. There might be a visual metaphor for that somewhere.

Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time.

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.

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.

The photograph contains and constrains within its own boundaries, excluding all else, a microcosmic analogue of the framing of space which is knowledge. As such it becomes a metaphor of power, having the ability to appropriate and decontextualize time and space and those who exist within it.

I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.

When 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.

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

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.

I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.

I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.

The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.

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.

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

To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.

It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.

Metaphorically I am made of chairs. It's a metaphor though. That means I am not actually made of the chairs.

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.

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.

'Triboluminescence' is actually a scientific world meaning striking something and creating light from dark. I thought it was a great word and that is was a very apt metaphor for making music - or any creative act, really. We all start in the dark and have to create light.

Metaphors 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.

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

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.

Training for me is a metaphor for life, period. The dedication, the determination, the desire, the work ethic, the great successes and the great failures - I take that into life.

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.

The debt ceiling debacle is almost a horrible metaphor: It's as if a bomb went off at 800 Pennsylvania Avenue and sent shrapnel flying in every direction. I don't know what these guys think they're doing, but it looks like they're committing political suicide.

I'm a little more mature, and a little more aware of the things that I might say. But um, it aint going nowhere because everyone still loves sex, but it's how you present it like I have this one track of Choice," which is a metaphor.

It hit me that an Apache resistance would be a wonderful, you know, it would be a wonderful metaphor for Jewish-American soldiers to be using behind enemy lines against the Nazis because the Apache Indians... were able to fight off for decades both the Spaniards and the Mexicans and the U.S. Cavalry for years because of their - they were great guerrilla fighters. They were great resistance fighters. And one of their ways of winning battles was psychological battles.

To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free. That was my idea about sound. It still is, that they should breathe ... not to be used for the vested interest of an idea. I feel that music should have no vested interests, that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it ... except that it's some kind of life force that to some degree really changes your life ... if you're into it.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

You know what’s a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up. — Tiny Cooper

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

It was easier than explaining DiMaggio's use as a metaphor.