Metaphor Quotes - Page 25

• You don't organize metaphors . . . you explode them.

  Ray Bradbury

  Organize

  5 Copy quote

• Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Creating, Interesting, Magic

  "Francesca Lia Block’s Elements Of Style". Interview with Jennifer Sky, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 15, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Will we allow the decline of our language-the language of Shakespeare, Shaw and Steinbeck? Will we abuse our precious gift of communication? Will we bite our mother tongue with the teeth of indifference, crushing the taste buds of clarity and, without prompt application of the antiseptic of education, causing the gangrene of strained metaphors? Stand up, America, and let me hear your answer: Ain't no way, dude!

  Mike Nichols

  Crush, Mother, Communication

  8 Copy quote

• Frankenstein can be a metaphor for abandonment, or wanting to be accepted for who you are, or not liking who you are and wanting to actually change that.

  Kevin Grevioux

  Abandonment, Accepted, Who You Are

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Christopher Langan

  God, Religious, Believe

  46 Copy quote

• When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

  John Philpot Curran

  I Can

  4 Copy quote

• The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.

  Aberjhani

  Dancing, Halos, Vortex

  Aberjhani (2010). “The River of Winged Dreams (Hardcover Gift Edition)”, p.83, Lulu.com

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The poet wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.

  Cleanth Brooks

  Taken, Risk, Want

  9 Copy quote

• The body is like an elaborate metaphor. One may be able to taste and not swallow, like the anorexic, or to swallow and not integrate, like the bulimic or obese.

  Marion Woodman

  Body, May, Able

  Marion Woodman (1993). “Conscious Femininity: Interviews with Marion Woodman”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

  Neil Postman

  Vegas, Messages, Television

  6 Copy quote

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

  George Orwell

  Speech, Use, Figures

  George Orwell (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950”

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I dont think theres any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaphors like that.

  Guy Gavriel Kay

  Growing Up, Real, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

  Miguel Syjuco

  Memories, Cities, Shopping

  17 Copy quote

• Young people are dazzled by the brilliancy of antithesis, and employ it. Matter-of-fact men, and those who like precision, naturally fall into comparisons and metaphor. Sprightly natures, full of fire, and whom a boundless imagination carries beyond all rules, and even what is reasonable, cannot rest satisfied even with hyperbole. As for the sublime, it is only great geniuses and those of the very highest order that are able to rise to its height.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Fall, Men, Order

  7 Copy quote

• Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

  James Russell Lowell

  Memories, Home, Gunpowder

  James Russell Lowell (1910). “Essays, English and American”

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Oliver Goldsmith

  Fashion, Ignorance, Order

  "On the Ladies' Passion for Levelling All Distinction of Dress". Essay by Oliver Goldsmith,

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.

  Jan Struther

  Gardening, Worst, Knows

  Jan Struther (1940). “Mrs. Miniver”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Reality, Stronger, Palestine

  24 Copy quote

• I definitely write about my life and the issues I might have or the dilemmas I'm going through, but usually I write about it in a general way and make metaphors. Like "I'm the wolf and you are the moon ".

  Oh Land

  Writing, Moon, Issues

  4 Copy quote

• Randian heroes come off as metaphors for Jews because they are beset by irrational forces that try to bar them from the professions and use their virtues against them to bring about their destruction.

  Florence King

  Hero, Atheism, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• I talk a lot in metaphors. I get my words out but sometimes they don't make sense.

  David Boreanaz

  Sometimes, Make Sense

  Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. May 12, 2014.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Immortal Technique

  Real, Years, America

  Source: www.gadflyonline.com

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

  Deborah Tannen

  War, Taken, Fighting

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Donna Farhi

  Breathing, Way, Inevitable Change

  Donna Farhi (1996). “The Breathing Book: Good Health and Vitality Through Essential Breath Work”, p.5, Macmillan

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• This is a magical and inspiring metaphor through which adult readers will identify anger issues and discover practical methods to energize enduring change.

  Jeffrey K. Zeig

  Issues, Adults, Method

  4 Copy quote