Metaphor Quotes - Page 9

• Why aren't we looking at the causes of breast cancer? Why aren't we spending our energy on looking at what we're doing to the earth? On the pollutants we're putting into the earth? And the pesticides we're putting into the earth? What we're releasing into the air? Instead, we just cut off more organs! That's where metaphor comes into it - not even metaphor as much as reality.

  Eve Ensler

  Cancer, Cutting, Reality

  "The Big Idea: Eve Ensler". Interview with Suzanne Koven, therumpus.net. June 12, 2013.

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• The film [Sightseers] is really the story of the journey of a relationship, so the killings are almost a metaphor for the trials they go through. We wanted people to identify with the experience of going on holiday and having a quarrel with your wife, boyfriend, whatever. We knew if we didn't crack that it would not be watchable as a film.

  Alice Lowe

  Holiday, Journey, People

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• I often give this metaphor where I say that writing short fiction is like surfing, while writing a novel is like navigating with your car. So when you navigate with your car, you want to get somewhere. When you surf, you don't want to get somewhere, you just don't want to fall off your board.

  Etgar Keret

  Fall, Writing, Giving

  "Etgar Keret: We Can Try to Be Human". Interview with Meakin Armstrong, www.guernicamag.com. August 17, 2015.

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• Whereas 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 Rankine

  Fall, Writing, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Moving, Practice, Choices

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.

  Annia Ciezadlo

  Children, War, Book

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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.

  Norman Lock

  Lying, Character, Theatre

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I've learned a lot about language from reading slush. You can immediately tell if a writer is in control of the narrative. This writer will avoid using too many words like "possibly," "probably," "maybe," "perhaps," etc. He/she will avoid using clichés, as well as a lot of metaphors, and won't take four sentences to say what they could in one (or write a great sentence and follow it up with a bunch of stuff that just weakens it).

  Mary J. Miller

  Reading, Writing, Four

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.

  Leigh Newman

  Kings, Book, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Mirrors, Order

  Source: therumpus.net

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• But the poetry side is what appeals more to me today. Metaphor, just absurd linkages and coming up with categories, labeling, taxonomy, and I'd say that I do have some tools left. There are days I can't make a sentence out of anything, and anything I make looks clunky to me. But I still have a general grasp of the cliché, of the generic sentence. And if I didn't have that, I'd be a blob of putty on the floor.

  Richard Meltzer

  Tools, Looks, Taxonomy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation.

  Sam Hamill

  Powerful, War, Writing

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain.

  Sam Hamill

  Voice, Self, Chinese

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• Maybe we need more dialogue in terms of our faith, in terms of those who are believers, or even nonbelievers, about that aspect, and what that might mean if you were interpreting. You don't have to believe it; maybe you could draw a metaphor from it.

  Joseph Fiennes

  Believe, Mean, Needs

  "A chat with Joseph Fiennes - star of historical thriller "Risen". Interview with Ann Schneible, www.catholicnewsagency.com. February 10, 2016.

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• 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.

  Ginuwine

  Sex, Track, Choices

  Source: www.parlemag.com

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• In essence, we string theorists have been trying to work out the score of the universe, the harmonies of the universe, the mathematical vibrations that the strings would play. So musical metaphors have been with us in science since the beginning.

  Brian Greene

  Essence, Play, Work Out

  "Professor Brian Greene answers everything you wanted to know about string theory and the multiverse". www.abc.net.au. February 26, 2016.

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• 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.

  Brian Greene

  Reality, Musical, Would Be

  "Professor Brian Greene answers everything you wanted to know about string theory and the multiverse". www.abc.net.au. February 26, 2016.

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• I argue against literal interpretation of religious doctrines. Religions make progress when they emancipate themselves from literalism, and take their doctrinal statements to be metaphors or allegories.

  Philip Kitcher

  Religious, Progress, Doctrine

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I was particularly drawn to Berlin because of its literal, concrete division. Two halves making a whole, or two entities that were altered doubles of each other? Twins that had been separated and kept in neighbouring houses and raised according to different sets of rules as a social experiment? It was irresistible as a metaphor for division in the mind, for a split personality.

  Nicholas Royle

  Two, House, Personality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• What better metaphor for the subliminal state than capitalism? This whole notion that you're trying to do good and make things good for the world, but at the same time the reality is that you have to eat other people to end up on top.

  Owen Pallett

  Reality, People, Trying

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Audio virology is not a metaphor. It is to be taken literally. It maps real processes of mutation, transmission, contagion and memory within music culture.

  Kode9

  Memories, Real, Taken

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I'm super happy to see the record doing its thing and for people to like it, but for me, I had a great victory just as a person. I overstepped countless obstacles by creating that record. And the record's a metaphor for the personal steps I [took] throughout the past year.

  Justin Vernon

  Past, Years, Creating

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I 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 Wasikowska

  Wall, Character, Eggs

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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• Now, 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 Hirsch

  Development, Form, Inventing

  Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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• Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

  Edward Hirsch

  Character, Order, Feelings

  "Poets v. Prose Writers". Big Think interview, bigthink.com.

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