Metaphor Quotes - Page 2

...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

You know what they say about air and water when it comes to fire, don’t you?” she

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. The disease itself becomes a metaphor. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival. Something is said to be disease-like, meaning that it is disgusting or ugly.

Susan Sontag

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

Susan Sontag

You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you

John Green

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.

Richard Powers

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

Norbert Wiener

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

Geoffrey Wood

So this is the boom, eh?” I said. “Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?” “I’ll tell you what it’s like,” he said glumly. “It’s like being in Caligula’s Rome, and everyone around you’s having an orgy, and you’re the mug stuck looking after the horse.” He pulled heavily on his cigarette. “The whole thing’ll come crashing down,” he said bleakly, “and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.

Paul Murray

Some say you have only one shot in life, well if you get ammo, you can reload.

Micah Elza

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up.

Susan Sontag

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

John Green

Beth's not on that train?""Nope. She's not even in that station, that town, or that part of whatever country your metaphor lives in.

J.R. Ward

I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life.

John Scalzi

...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.

Haruki Murakami

Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.

Mary Karr

I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue-sweet yet insubstantial.

Rachel Vincent

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.

Aristotle

And feast on the dead, I thought with a shudder. As if he could read my thoughts, he pressed a hand to my shoulder. His fingers were long and white, splaying over my arm like a waxen spider. If the gesture was meant to comfort me, it failed.

Leigh Bardugo

Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.

René Magritte

In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air.

Claire Fuller

I'm trying to keep you safe." Safe as a porcelain bowl wrapped in cotton linen and boxed up. It would be a lie to say she didn't want to feel safe, or that Nolan's worry didn't leave her feeling warm and even a bit precious. But it also left her feeling trapped, like an ornamental bird kept in a cage, its wings clipped.

Page Morgan

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil.

Christopher Paolini

This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.

Bryant A. Loney

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex? I never have to say: "What shall I compare this to?" a summer's day? No. I have to beat the comparisons back into the holes they pour from. Some salt is savory. I live in a sea.

william gass

If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.

william gass

You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.

Shirley Jump

Is there anyone nearby you can speak to without words?”“I don’t know. I only know that there are those whose minds I can speak with that, when I show them how, speak back to my mind as well.

Tom Larcombe

That one,” Ferox said, pointing at Johann with a claw. “I can see he’s communicated like that before and I think I can speak to his mind. Let me see.”After a moment, Johann broke from the line and approached the dragon.“You did ask me to come closer, didn’t you?” he asked.“Yes, I can speak to this one. He can be my rider.

Tom Larcombe

Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.

Fredrik Backman

It's not always so easy," she said softly."Why not? It's a part of who you are, isn't it?" he asked with all the sympathy of an asp being prodded with a stick.

Page Morgan

Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!

Fred Van Lente

Speech is the pen and the sword of humankind and it is the foundation of their kingdom. Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies are. defeated and scattered. In the arenas in which speech shouts out, the sounds of cannon balls become like the buzzing of bees. from behind the battlements on which the banner of speech has been raised, the sound of its drums are heard. In the precincts where its march reverberates, kings shake in their boots. The Master of Speech smashed to pieces many insurmountable walls, in the face of which Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and many others despaired or retread; and the pen of Speech, imparting and compliance, was saluted and praised.

M. Fethullah Gülen

…The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

Brian Greene

In short, if you are using a shovel to dig yourself into a hole, a credit card company will be happy to give you a backhoe.

Jason G. Miller

...maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems--maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.

Jodi Picoult

I'm sorry you lost the suit,' he said.She shrugged.'At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,' she said...

James S.A. Corey

The sun was shut up in a cold bottle.

Saul Bellow

I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.

Rachel Hartman

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.

Shahriar Mandanipour

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.

Lauren Groff

My words are like Mummy: butterflies trapped inside a net.

Holly Bodger

Love is like a climbing rope. There are little knots along the way, but if you learn off of them, you can get higher than you ever expected.

A.M.L

It was a quiet taunt...a poisoned glass of wine, meant to intoxicate and exsanguinate.

Renee Ahdieh

Mind you,” said Ponder, “the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death—” “Chicken soup and croutons,” said Ridcully. "Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination".

Terry Pratchett

He sips his drink and it leaves his handlebar mustache dripping like a cattle dog come outta a river.

Erin Bowman

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

Matthew De Abaitua

You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time. It went on and on,-and on.

Bess Streeter Aldrich

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.

Brian Doyle

My knee struck a tree root as my vision went black. Suddenly, I was in a building at Haven Crest, kneeling on the floor. Blood, thick and clotted like canned cherries, crept down the walls. The lights above my head flickered off then on with a menacing hum.

Kady Cross

No more kissing beneath bridges?"Her face heated. She turned to go only to have him catch her sleeve. It was a risk, having such long sleeves."Why don't we both stay back here? No one will miss us and you're the most interesting part of the banquet anyway.""Shameless," she scolded.

Jeannie Lin

His studies were always second to Beatrice. He would've said everything was second to Beatrice but the flowery metaphors and literary devices can only stretch so far and for so many characters.

Bruce Crown

He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every word tacked nine-inches deep into the beams of our minds.

Chigozie Obioma

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.

Matthew De Abaitua

It's like raking leaves in the wind.

Charlie Raymond

The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.

Thomas Hardy

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

Ruth Rendell

The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.

David Gianadda

A chill swept through the air, the sort of graveyard kiss promising bad news to follow.

Katherine McIntyre

Previous 1 2 3 4 … 9 Next

Metaphor Quotes - Page 2

Related Topics