Metaphor Quotes

#1. 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. #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#2. But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race. #Quote by Donald Antrim

#3. [Francesca] 'You really are a few biscuits short of breakfast.'
His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
'You're a few colors shy of a rainbow?' she offered. 'Not pulling a full wagon? Knitting with only one needle? All foam and no beer? Your cheese slid off the cracker? You couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel?'
[Nicodemus] 'All right. I get it. #Quote by Blake Charlton

#4. The scientists nodded and wrote on their clipboards. All information was important information, even if the reasons were not immediately apparent. The reason for anything was rarely immediately or even eventually apparent, but it existed somewhere, like a moon that had escaped orbit and was no longer a moon but just a piece of something that once was, spinning off into the nothing. The scientists were just then writing down that very metaphor. Metaphors are a big part of science. #Quote by Joseph Fink

#5. 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. #Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

#6. But unlike Mama, I would not go to heaven. My secrets padlocked the gates. I'd be a torn kite stuck in the dead branches of a tree, unable to fly. #Quote by Ruta Sepetys

#7. A tidy metaphor does not make a wrong thing right. #Quote by David Mitchell

#8. Any movement or sound is a profession of faith,
as the millstone grinding is explaining
how it believes in the river.
No metaphor can explain this,
but I cannot stop pointing to the beauty.

Every moment and place says,
Put this design in your carpet.

I want to be in such a passionate adoration
that my tent gets pitched against the sky.

Let the beloved come
and sit like a guard dog
in front of the tent.

When the ocean surges,
don't let me just hear it.
Let is splash inside my chest. #Quote by Rumi

#9. Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose. #Quote by Francesca Lia Block

#10. The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.
At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward. #Quote by Terence McKenna

#11. The soldier stared at Ingrid. His silence was elastic, slowly curling a rope around her neck. #Quote by Ruta Sepetys

#12. Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon. #Quote by Morton Feldman

#13. Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute. #Quote by James Geary

#14. The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is - to me at least - more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission - which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference - to put it sharply - is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. #Quote by Joseph Campbell

#15. That to fly requires chaotic, sometimes even violent passages
becomes a metaphor for all of life's most meaningful endeavors. #Quote by Kelly Corrigan

#16. Every book was a door; every page a new place to hide. #Quote by Drew Magary

#17. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges. #Quote by Vladimir Nabokov

#18. A man's whole life / may be a metaphor - but a woman's lot / is symbol. #Quote by Lorna Dee Cervantes

#19. Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely. #Quote by Deb Caletti

#20. 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. #Quote by Bruce Crown

#21. I generally read every night befi=ore I fall asleep: Brad does too. I find it comforting to lie beside my husband, each of us with a book in our hands. I see it as a period of calm and intimacy, and as the perfect metaphor-together, yet individual-for our marriage. #Quote by Debbie Macomber

#22. Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor. #Quote by Jack D. Zipes

#23. Individualism. Campbell said, "All religions are true in that the metaphor is true." I think this means that religions are meant to be literary maps, not literal doctrines, a signpost to the unknowable, a hymn to the inconceivable. Edward Slingerland is a professor #Quote by Russell Brand

#24. 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. #Quote by Thomas Hardy

#25. In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor. #Quote by Derrick Jensen

#26. Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless
as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own overfilled mind. The problem is to clear out most of what is in it ... The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I wanted to flee from Thomas's house. #Quote by Janet Malcolm

#27. It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me. #Quote by Roger Zelazny

#28. For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone's on board, there's no chance to steer, and it's clickety-clack to collectivism's dreams. #Quote by Mei Fong

#29. 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. #Quote by Nicole Krauss

#30. Be passive. In your passivity, God comes. Be feminine. In your femininity, God comes. Have you not watched it? Buddha looks very feminine, Krishna looks very feminine. Why? - because it is simply a metaphor. They have been depicted as feminine, graceful, to show that that is their inner quality - receptivity. When you are doing something you are being aggressive. When you are not doing anything you are non-aggressive. And God cannot be conquered; you can only allow him to conquer you. #Quote by Rajneesh

#31. How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing life? These images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make ... #Quote by Joseph Campbell

#32. Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use. #Quote by Catherine Lacey

#33. Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. #Quote by Joseph Campbell

#34. It's kind of like this," Decker said: "You wake up in the middle of the night and you're dying for a glass of milk. So you stumble out of bed, stub your toe in the darkness, scream with pain, and limp your way to the refrigerator. You open it up and the light is brilliant. You're saved. Then you fold back the paper container, open up the milk, take a deep breath, and put it to your lips. Only
yhrch!
the milk is spoiled. Sure, you're bummed. You fold the thing close and put it back in the fridge. It's dark again. But as you're making your way to your lonely old bed, you think to yourself, Wait a minute, maybe that milk wasn't so bad. And I am still thirsty? So you do an about-face and go back to the fridge. The light warms you up again. You take a sip and yup, it's still spoiled. That, to me, is the fitting metaphor for most every relationship I've ever been in. #Quote by Ethan Hawke

#35. For countless Americans, Germany remains the ultimate metaphor of evil... #Quote by Deidre Berger

#36. Why do the X-Men need another girl telepath?" she asked. "This one has purple hair." "It's all so sexist." Park's eyes got wide. Well, sort of wide. Sometimes she wondered if the shape of his eyes affected how he saw things. That was probably the most racist question of all time. "The X-Men aren't sexist," he said, shaking his head. "They're a metaphor for acceptance; they've sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them." "Yeah," she said, "but - " "There's no but," he said, laughing. "But," Eleanor insisted, "the girls are all so stereotypically girly and passive. Half of them just think really hard. Like that's their superpower, thinking. And Shadowcat's power is even worse - she disappears. #Quote by Rainbow Rowell

#37. Sometimes, child, we die in metaphor. #Quote by Kiana Davenport

#38. A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice. #Quote by Jane Smiley

#39. A flower doesn't expect love. She is happy with herself. If she gets love, she celebrates. #Quote by Debasish Mridha

#40. You know how exit signs are bright and red and at times we're blind to what's behind? The doors are just subliminal metaphors that lead us through life. We never know, but we take a chance and open it. #Quote by Dominic Riccitello

#41. Metaphor has a devilish way of blinding us to the truth. #Quote by Ka Wai Cheung

#42. Aristotle said29 that "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 similarity in dissimilars. #Quote by Robert Bosnak

#43. Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor. #Quote by China Mieville

#44. It is impossible to build sound constitutional doctrine upon a mistaken understanding of Constitutional history ... The establishment clause has been expressly freighted with Jefferson's misleading metaphor for nearly forty years ... There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the framers intended to build a wall of separation ... The recent court decisions are in no way based on either the language or intent of the framers. #Quote by William Rehnquist

#45. Analogies and metaphors have often proved pivotal in expanding our thoughts both within and without science, and so one should not discourage the attempt to synthesize apparent opposites. However, citizens of the New Age often forget that, when they involve science, analogies should be tempered by experiment and calculation. #Quote by Tony Rothman

#46. I loved Catwoman's sense of humor. I love how sly she is. I love how she, to use a cat metaphor, walks the fence and you don't know which side she's going to come down on. She's totally independent. And let's face it, she's badass. #Quote by Anne Hathaway

#47. Analogies always deceive more than they reveal; I am no fan of analogies, I do not use them. Even metaphor, that mental operation we use with almost every word we speak, is slippery and deceptive. I always speak as plainly as I can.
And yet language, and therefore thought, is a strange and imprecise game of metaphors and analogies, one that we must play to stay alive. #Quote by Kim Stanley Robinson

#48. Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time. #Quote by Robert McKee

#49. Lady, you can't fuck a metaphor. #Quote by Edward Albee

#50. Invisible prose only!" rules out the sparkling style of [writers] ... For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique caliber of truth. Is there any other art form one would praise by saying it's "invisible"? By definition, art transcends the ordinary, calls attention to itself, and offers virtuosity as its calling card. One that makes it possible to do what metaphor does so well: illuminate what can't be wholly understood. #Quote by Diane Ackerman

#51. In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious. #Quote by George Lakoff

#52. The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind. #Quote by Terry Pratchett

#53. We are prisoners of our own metaphors, metaphorically speaking ... #Quote by R. Buckminster Fuller

#54. Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life. #Quote by Jeanette Winterson

#55. If I'd let my mind roll with that boxing metaphor just a little longer, I might've followed it to its logical conclusion: In a boxing match, the fighters absorb some vicious blows because they're ready for them. And usually, the knockout punch is the one they didn't see coming #Quote by Todd Burpo

#56. Unless you're the lead dog the view never changes ...
mercy out does justice every time:
always find your way back home/ #Quote by Bob Mitchley

#57. When anxiety about the course of a new cultural movement or political controversy arose, the average American did not have far to go to find a handy historical parallel to express quickly and completely the nature of his fears. If the concern threatened his sense of himself as part of a new nation that was moving forward, the metaphor of Salem witchcraft functioned well as a universally familiar shorthand for the social and political costs of sliding backward into a colonial world of irrationality, tyranny, and superstition. #Quote by Gretchen A. Adams

#58. Just because something is a metaphor doesn't mean it can't be real. #Quote by Terry Pratchett

#59. A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth. #Quote by Matthew Woodring Stover

#60. Let the snake that bit you bite me back. Let it bite me on the lip. Die with me. #Quote by Andre Aciman

#61. The real artist with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire and does it again!"
"All art is a metaphor it's by telling you one thing when your mean something else.
The Old Man in the Sea is not about fishing!"
"Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby. #Quote by Harry Crews

#62. It was easier than explaining DiMaggio's use as a metaphor. #Quote by Paul Simon

#63. The Kleinrock controversy is interesting because it shows that most of the Internet's creators preferred - to use the metaphor of the Internet itself - a system of fully distributed credit. They instinctively isolated and routed around any node that tried to claim more significance than the others. The Internet was born of an ethos of creative collaboration and distributed decision making, and its founders liked to protect that heritage. It became ingrained in their personalities - and in the DNA of the Internet itself. #Quote by Walter Isaacson

#64. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe # running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life, #Quote by Haruki Murakami

#65. The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word. #Quote by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

#66. It scares me shitless," I admitted. (The "scared shitless" metaphor derives from the physiological fact that animals in stressful situations-an antelope pursued by a lion, for example-involuntarily defecate to shed excess weight, thus speeding their flight.) #Quote by James Geary

#67. My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all. #Quote by Lyndsay Faye

#68. Outside the window, broken and abandoned husks dotted the landscape, set against the gray, dishwater sky. Scarred and beaten, the perfect metaphor for the people who lived within its forgotten neighborhoods, Detroit was like an abused kid, just waiting for the day someone would come along and give a fuck about it. The third world city of America. #Quote by Keri Lake

#69. Sure, zombies can "be a metaphor." They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity's feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.

But really, zombies are not "supposed to be metaphors." They're supposed to be friggin' zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.

That's the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. […]

Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don't just stand around "being metaphors" whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world. #Quote by Scott Westerfeld

#70. The problem isn't that I'm uncomfortable with it, the problem is that I want it!" I yelled. It was official; I'd lost it. Oh well, I wasn't known for having a long fuse.
"Are you happy? Jesus. You say something like that and then expect me to just be whatever about it. That's like teasing someone with a giant red velvet cake and then putting it in one of those glass rotating desert thingies." I wasn't my most eloquent at the moment.
"Does this mean I'm the cake?"
"Shut up, it was a metaphor."
"So you want me?"
So much it hurt. "Yes," I whispered.
"Right now?"
"Yes."
"Oh." Now he was the one who sounded nervous.
"It's just... a surprise."
"I told you I would entertain the idea."
"I know. I just didn't think you'd be so enthusiastic so soon."
"Hunter, I'm a virgin. Not a nun."
He didn't talk for a moment.
"That was the sexiest thing you've ever said. God, why do you do this to me? #Quote by Chelsea M. Cameron

#71. The authors disclose that in less than a century the word "tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, "The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another. #Quote by Philip Zaleski

#72. Friends are like sugar. When you have them, you'll feel happiness. When you have too many of them, you will suffer. #Quote by Ade Santi

#73. I feel like metaphors are best when they spin in place. Like when they work and don't work, or lead to a bigger question. #Quote by Jordan Wolfson

#74. We [can] catch fish and just throw them back ... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then ... one [may] swallow the hook ... [it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I've swallowed it big time. #Quote by Graham McNamee

#75. Very Like a Whale

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can'ts seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have
to go out
of their way to say that it is like something else.
What foes it mean when we are told
That the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot
of Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and thus
hinder longevity,
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were gleaming
in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a wolf
on
the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy there
are
a great many things,
But i don't imagine that among then there is a wolf with purple
and gold
cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually
like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and
big white teeth and did he say Woof woof?
Fra #Quote by Ogden Nash

#76. I was working with Toby Gad, who spent a lot of time in India. There's a sitar [in "Body Shop"] and the song has a very Indian flavor to it. I liked the idea of the body of a car as a kind of sexual metaphor - What you do to a car, what you do in a car - drive. So, lots of innuendos, and lots of fun. #Quote by Madonna Ciccone

#77. Milton Erickson was a master at using experiential techniques to elicit strengths that were previously dormant. Mills and Crowley have masterfully captured essential elements of Erickson's work and applied it to therapy with children. Easy to read, meticulously referenced, and filled with inspiring case studies, Therapeutic Metaphors for Children and the Child Within has now been updated with important new findings, and it's essential reading for clinicians who work with children as well as for those who want to improve their use of therapeutic metaphor. #Quote by Jeffrey K. Zeig

#78. Do you know about lock picking?"
"I'm sure it's like sex."
"I'm sure it's not like sex."
"How would you know? Everything's like sex. It's the universal metaphor. To pick a lock, let me guess, you have to go slow at first, but then you have to pull off some fancy moves, and you have to stay concentrated, and you have to stick something in something, right? #Quote by Ned Vizzini

#79. Children are tough, though we tend to think of them as fragile. They have to be tough. Childhood is not easy. We sentimentalize children, but they know what's real and what's not. They understand metaphor and symbol. If children are different from us, they are more spontaneous. Grown-up lives have become overlaid with dross. #Quote by Maurice Sendak

#80. 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. #Quote by Paul Murray

#81. If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown. #Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

#82. Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves. #Quote by Thomas S. Monson

#83. This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete! Hence, in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, when the apostle discusses largely the metaphor of a human body, he includes under the single name of Christ the whole Church. #Quote by John Calvin

#84. My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever. #Quote by Mary Gordon

#85. Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables. #Quote by Werner Heisenberg

#86. loved a man for years who said her eyes looked like the ocean, because she always wanted to be somebody's poem, somebody's simile, somebody's lackluster metaphor. #Quote by Trista Mateer

#87. & i wish there was a soft metaphor / to lower you into this grief. #Quote by Donte Collins

#88. A bit less obvious is the metaphor for human history, course, which refers to a path of running or flowing, as in the course of a river, a racecourse, and a headlong course. The metaphor is that A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IS MOTION ALONG A PATHWAY, a special case of the TIME IS MOTION metaphor we met in the previous chapter. #Quote by Steven Pinker

#89. Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn't work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer's real world and the writer's fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It's world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache. #Quote by David Mitchell

#90. So much is metaphor, an inadequately material way to speak of immaterial things. #Quote by Ann Leckie

#91. I didn't have the patience for the research, or anything like that. I just like how it sets the imagination off. It's just an area that's very fertile for great words. Great metaphors, potentially. #Quote by Andrew Bird

#92. Housing projects are a great metaphor for the government's relationship to poor folks: these huge islands built mostly in the middle of nowhere, designed to warehouse lives. People are still people, though, so we turned the projects into real communities, poor or not. We played in fire hydrants and had cookouts and partied, music bouncing off concrete walls. But even when we could shake off the full weight of those imposing buildings and try to just live, the truth of our lives and struggle was still invisible to the larger country. The rest of the country was freed of any obligation to claim us. Which was fine, because we weren't really claiming them, either. #Quote by Jay-Z

#93. Time is the moving image of eternity. #Quote by Plato

#94. The secret of mastering creativity in any field is knowing how to work with metaphor without getting caught in language ... #Quote by Martha N. Beck

#95. They are going to laugh at you and mock you and then they are going to - " "Eat me. Yes. I understand." "You don't seem to be grasping the meaning behind the words. This isn't a metaphor. I'm talking about huge teeth and digestive systems." "Fat and bones and marrow and meat," Winter sang. "We only wanted a snack to eat." Scarlet grunted. "You can be so disturbing. #Quote by Marissa Meyer

#96. As Roran watched, the man's arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief-from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like an empty waterskin. His lips puckered and drew back farther than they were intended to over his yellow teeth, baring them in a grisly snarl, while his eyeballs deflated as if they were engorged ticks being squished empty of blood, and the surrounding flesh sank inward. #Quote by Christopher Paolini

#97. Parvaneh's belly is now so big that she looks like a giant tortoise when she heaves herself down into a squatting position, one hand on the gravestone and the other hooked around Patrick's arm. Not that Ove dares bring up the giant tortoise metaphor, of course. There are more pleasant ways of killing oneself, he feels. #Quote by Fredrik Backman

#98. Stock and flow" is an economic concept that writer Robin Sloan has adapted into a metaphor for media: "Flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. #Quote by Austin Kleon

#99. The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not? #Quote by Dennis Potter

#100. In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak
That I used to say is my love for the world,
That I now would just call love as it is.
Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very. #Quote by Coleman Barks

#101. Blackmailers are never satisfied." His laughter faded into bitterness.
"Aren't they? How do you know?"
His words were empty, hollow. "When you're the brother of a duke and your wife died in mysterious circumstances, sharks come out of the woodwork."
"That's a mixed metaphor."
"Bugger metaphors. They're human sharks and they come out of the shadows when you least expect them. #Quote by Jennifer Ashley

#102. Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken. #Quote by Marion Woodman

#103. Football became my obvious metaphor as it does for many, and I began to equate this as being 'halftime' in my life. As I reflected on my professional life I realized how much time I had spent trying to make first downs and score touchdowns. My focus had now changed into trying to be more about people and serving others. #Quote by Marc Trestman

#104. Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue. #Quote by Julian Barnes

#105. I was tied down in that chair for 10 minutes and experienced what it was like to be completely powerless while someone else has complete dominance. It's sadistic, even though I find Richard to be a really lovely human being. That's what the whole film [Tickled] is about. It's not a film about tickling, but I think tickling offers a really good visual metaphor for the much bigger ideas that we were trying to get at about power and control - by people who have a lot of money - over people without money and who have no power in the relationship. #Quote by David Farrier

#106. Jamie's viewpoint is expressed almost entirely in metaphor: If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle. He's using physical language, but he isn't talking about the physical details of the situation. Claire alludes to her emotion and shows it by her actions, but Jamie is thinking directly in pure emotions. #Quote by Diana Gabaldon

#107. Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's. #Quote by Dorianne Laux

#108. Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be
at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror,
but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means.
It's like having a war on dandruff, it's endless and pointless. #Quote by Gore Vidal

#109. When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference. #Quote by Lauren Oliver

#110. If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this - the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage - such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality - to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are "raw files." But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero's personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him. #Quote by Bernard Knox

#111. Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism. #Quote by Veronica Hollinger

#112. Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly. #Quote by Susannah Cahalan

#113. As the second decade of the twenty-first century has worn on, politicians of all stripes, aware of the political power of the unmarried woman yet seemingly incapable of understanding female life outside of a marital context, have come to rely on a metaphor in which American women, no longer bound to men, are binding themselves to government. #Quote by Rebecca Traister

#114. With my white friends, I'm always half Mexican. They never say I'm half Irish. Never say I'm half white. Like I'm tainted halfway from the standard. It's like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor. #Quote by Bill Konigsberg

#115. Of course we have an 'unconscious mind' and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a 'scientific' one. #Quote by Iris Murdoch

#116. A linguistically informed literary criticism is the key to resolving conflict and frustration, from psychotherapy and law to philosophy and politics. Call this the messianic theory. It is based on the idea that TO THINK IS TO GRASP A METAPHOR-the metaphor metaphor. #Quote by Steven Pinker

#117. The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared. #Quote by Tim Winton

#118. Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of all those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks – open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. Time and lost steal the zest from the unlucky, and leave them looking longingly at the past. Neoteny is a metaphor for the quality – and the gift – that keeps the fortunate of whatever age focused on all marvelous undiscovered things to come. #Quote by Warren G. Bennis

#119. The American model was celebrated by Thatcherites and New Labour alike, California worshipped as the model of the future, 'Anglo-Saxon' embalmed as the fitting metaphor for the shared Anglo-American legacy, Europe denigrated and the rest of the world ignored. #Quote by Martin Jacques

#120. Admiration is the daughter of ignorance. #Quote by Thomas Fuller

#121. She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to feel more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years.
Shape-shifters lived in a world of color and brightness, of heightened senses. They felt everything more intensely, and so they lived their lives more intensely - anything to make their hearts pound harder. Life could be like a drug.
But how does one wean oneself off life? #Quote by Nenia Campbell

#122. But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead. #Quote by Scarlett Thomas

#123. Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name. #Quote by G. Willow Wilson

#124. Art does not deny that evil is real, but it places evil in a context that implies an affirmation; the structure of the picture, which is a metaphor for the structure of the Creation, suggests that evil is not final. #Quote by Robert Adams

#125. Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is
the strong horse that pulls the whole cart. #Quote by Winston S. Churchill

#126. Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur. #Quote by Margaret Atwood

#127. Metaphors of unity and integration take us only so far, because they are derived from the finiteness of the human mind. #Quote by Northrop Frye

#128. So, did you see that community center I was talking about?"
"What? Where?"
"We walked right past it, just before that grocery store. I mentioned it on the way to the city? You just drop in and take classes. They've got all sorts of stuff. I bet you can get a student rate, even."
"But I'm not a student - "
"You're young enough that they'll assume - "
" - and how am I supposed to find the time to take dance classes, now that I'm the dessert?"
"I'm starting to really regret using that metaphor," Silas says, grinning. "And let me explain something, Rosie." He takes a swig of the coffee and presses his lips together, searching for words. "I'm from a long, long, long, long line of woodsmen. My brothers are all supertalented. They all built their own rooms. For god's sake, Lucas built a freaking wooden hot tub in his bedroom with wooden monkeys pouring water into it."
"Monkeys?"
"Don't ask. Anyway, I can do some woodworking. I know my way around the forest, I can handle an ax better than most, I can make a tree grow where nothing else will, I can live off berries and hunt for my food, and I've known about the Fenris since I could crawl. I'm a woodsman, for all intents and purposes. But that doesn't mean I live for it any more than the fact that you're good at hunting means you have to live for that. So maybe breaking out of the hunting lifestyle for a few hours here and there will help you figure out if it's really for you or not."
I shak #Quote by Jackson Pearce

#129. You never know what's going to be in the garden in June when you're looking at it in January. #Quote by Corey Ann Haydu

#130. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. #Quote by Antoine De Saint Exupery

#131. Burning Woman is a powerful image. A role model. A metaphor. A warning. A source of power. She is Feminine power incarnate. #Quote by Lucy H. Pearce

#132. I know that these mental disturbances of mine are not dangerous and give no promise of a storm; to express what I complain of in apt metaphor, I am distressed, not by a tempest, but by sea-sickness. #Quote by Seneca.

#133. Dance has been my medium, my metaphor, my message and my meditation. #Quote by Gabrielle Roth

#134. Censorship is the mother of metaphor. #Quote by Jorge Luis Borges

#135. Movement is my medium and my metaphor. I know that if a wave of energy is allowed to complete itself, it yields a whole new wave, and in fact that is all I really know. Riding these waves means joining the cosmic dance that, as Dante says, 'moves the sun and the other stars.' #Quote by Gabrielle Roth

#136. As I read my poems aloud, I paid still more attention to sound in my writing. One morning as I revised, I set down a word that I knew was not right, and I heard myself think: But I can say it so that it's right. Immediately, I knew that I had understood one of the hazards of reading aloud. Performance can paper over bad writing, or substitute for the best language. Performance is a problem, and most performance poets or slammers are actors or standup comedians and not poets; we never hear a line break and seldom a new metaphor. There are other problems with the popularity of the poetry reading, but largely the reading has been good for poetry because poets watch their own poems come back to them on the faces of listeners. One addresses not only the Muse but actual people. #Quote by Donald Hall

#137. She'd once read a description of new motherhood that had struck her, at the time that she was returning to work after maxing out her maternity leave allowance, as a beautiful metaphor for her own days back at the office. It was that mother and baby are like a ball of yarn, and when the mother leaves the baby's side, it's as if the baby grabs hold of the loose end, a tug that both mother and baby feel in their every fiber. As they both move through the hours spent apart, the string unravels more and more, and then just when each is starting to feel diminished, barely even a ball of yarn at all anymore, it's time for the mother to make her way back. Together again, they need only a bit of time to wind the string back up, and then it's as if they had never been apart, right up until they wake up and do it all over again. #Quote by Jessica Strawser

#138. Every culture that's ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be delivered in the next 18 months, and from Egypt forward they've been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things and yet we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we're whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you're not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that's been developed ... #Quote by Terence McKenna

#139. My hope is that the music will serve as a metaphor for the actions taken by the inhabitants of this wonderful planet as a call for world harmony on all levels. #Quote by Herbie Hancock

#140. The reason is that the English language treats a changing entity (a loaded wagon, sprayed roses, a painted door) in the same way that it treats a moving entity (pitched hay, sprayed water, slopped paint). A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state-space. In this way, locative constructions illustrate a second discovery in the hidden world down the rabbit hole, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language. #Quote by Steven Pinker

#141. I punched her in the face and she got a nosebleed and cried. An accurate metaphor for most of my past friendships. #Quote by Alice Oseman

#142. 'Matterhorn' is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again. #Quote by Karl Marlantes

#143. Jody screamed at him: a high, explosive, unintelligible expulsion of pure inhuman frustration
a Hendrix high note sampled and sung by a billion suffering souls in Hell's own choir. #Quote by Christopher Moore

#144. There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of belonging, one heart to another. WIthout the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart. #Quote by Cynthia Ozick

#145. But it was probably long before anyone thought of pottery that the river was first perceived as a metaphor of destiny, the "clan river" of eternity connecting the three worlds. The bear signaled--perhaps seemed even to oversee--the arrival of the salmon. The salmon were human food too, which made the first link in the man-bear-river-salmon system a tangible reality. We can only guess how the river's eternal flow, the upstream movement of the miraculous fish from the depths of a watery matrix toward the almost ethereal spring at the headwaters, or their fate in the stomach of the bear might have stimulated the concept of reincarnation. In time, the spiritual forces represented by the physical realities could be grappled with by a shaman, who would travel the river to the ancestral downstream and the immortal upstream in a trance instead of a boat. #Quote by Paul Shepard

#146. A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there-a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. #Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

#147. […] but her mother's death had revealed that there was no metaphor too ostentatious for grief. It was a terrible thing and demanded embellishment. #Quote by Kate Atkinson

#148. The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake. #Quote by Kurt Vonnegut

#149. Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see. #Quote by Garth Risk Hallberg

#150. It's like the tide, Jo, when it turns it goes slowly--but it can't be stopped. #Quote by Louisa May Alcott

#151. By nature we are creatures of hope, always ready to be deceived again, caught by the marvel that might be wrapped in the grubbiest brown paper parcel. #Quote by J.L. Carr

#152. I explain at the parties that I believe knitting is a transformative and intriguing act that can change the life and brain of the person doing it, and that knitting is a perfect metaphor for life and insight into some better ways through it. #Quote by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

#153. We are not just tickling the dragon's tail; we are timing a flyby through its open jaws while it is yawning. #Quote by Marko Kloos

#154. For me, the flow of information was an apt metaphor. As surfing became my obsession at a young age, my innovation had been to remap my tactile sense into the water around me. Sitting on my surfboard, bobbing up and down between the swells, I could feel the pressure, shape, and temperature of the water's surface around me through my skin. The thousands of neurons attached to each hair follicle could sense even tiny subsurface eddies and water currents. After nearly twenty years of dedicated practice, my brain had neuroplastically reformatted to devote a large part of itself to my water-sense, and I now had the most highly attuned tactile array of any pssi-kid, or for that matter anyone else in the world. Sitting with my eyes closed, I could feel the water moving and undulating around me as a perfectly natural and integral part of my body. I was one with the water, and it was one with me. #Quote by Matthew Mather

#155. Thanks to suffering and madness, I have had a finer, richer life than any of you, and I wish to go to my death with dignity, as befits the great moment after which all dignity and majesty cease. Let my body be my ark and my death a long floating on the waves of eternity. A nothing amid nothingness. What defense have I against nothingness but this ark in which I have tried to gather everything that was dear to me, people, birds, animals, and plants, everything that I carry in my eye and in my heart, in the triple-decked ark of my body and soul. Like the pharaohs in the majestic peace of their tombs, I wanted to have all those things with me in death, I wanted everything to be as it was before; I wanted the birds to sing for me forever, I wanted to exchange Charon's bark for another, less desolate and less empty; I wanted to ennoble eternity's unconscionable void with the bitter herbs that spring from the heart of man, to ennoble the soundless emptiness of eternity with the cry of the cuckoo and the song of the lark. All I have done is to develop that bitter poetic metaphor, carry it with passionate logic to its ultimate consequence, which transforms sleep into waking (and the converse); lucidity into madness (and the converse); life into death, as though there were no borderline, and the converse; death into eternity, as if they were not one and the same thing. Thus my egoism is only the egoism of human existence, the egoism of life, counterweight to the egoism of death, and, #Quote by Danilo Kis

#156. He hesitated. "Nothing, man. What are you doing right now?"
I looked down. "Petting my snake."
Malcolm laughed. "With anyone else, that would be a metaphor. Good thing I can always count on you. #Quote by Diana Peterfreund

#157. You can approach 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death' in a variety or combination of ways: as a startlingly eccentric hobby; as a series of unresolved murder mysteries; as the manifestation of one woman's peculiar psychic life; as a lesson in forensics; as a metaphor for the fate of women; as a photographic study. #Quote by Robert Gottlieb

#158. In a way, the road between Huaraz and the lodge is a metaphor for Peruvian politics. It used to be in good repair, and in some places still is. #Quote by Mark Barrowcliffe

#159. He [Peter Pan] is a metaphor for dreams and faith. #Quote by Mark Burnett

#160. It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges. #Quote by Lauren Groff

#161. In the time we spend reeling in confusion, grasping at straws trying to piece our egos together, we forget to acknowledge some things. Society created gender roles and categorizations and lifestyles and names and titles because we fear the unknown, especially when the unknown is us.
It's as though we're stranded in the middle of an ocean, but we were promised the current would bring us back ashore. We're given all we need on the life raft. As far as we can see, we're being led back, slowly. We don't know when we'll approach the shore, but all evidence points to the fact that we will. But we don't spend our time looking around, enjoying the view, seeing who came with us, and riding out the waves. We sit and panic about what we're doing and why we came here.
It doesn't matter where we started because we may never know. It matters where we're going, because that, we do. We begin and we end. We've seen one, so there's only one other option. #Quote by Brianna Wiest

#162. The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped. #Quote by C.S. Forester

#163. Socrates […] is recorded as having said, sagely and with the greatest acuteness, that men's breasts should have windows in them and be open so that their thoughts would not remain concealed but open for inspection. #Quote by Vitruvius

#164. No more light answers. Let our officers
Have note what we purpose. I shall break
The cause of our expedience to the Queen
And get her leave to part. For not alone
The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,
Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too
Of many our contriving friends in Rome
Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius
Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never linked to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who - high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life - stands up
For the main soldier; whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison. #Quote by William Shakespeare

#165. 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. #Quote by Maude Barlow

#166. Not without design does God write the music of our lives. Be it ours to learn the tune, and not be dismayed at the 'rests.' They are not to be slurred over, not to be omitted, not to destroy the melody, not to change the keynote. If we look up, God Himself will beat the time for us. With the eye on Him, we shall strike the next note full and clear. If we sadly say to ourselves, "There is no music in a 'rest,'" let us not forget '"there is the making of music in it." The making of music is often a slow and painful process in this life. How patiently God works to teach us! How long He waits for us to learn the lesson! - Ruskin #Quote by Leslie Ludy

#167. I planted bulbs," he said. "I do it every autumn." "What kind of bulbs?" "They're a metaphor," he answered, and then he laughed. "They're daffodils, but I think of my fall planting as being like my students." "In what way?" "I plant them in the fall, and then all winter long when it's cold and miserable and every day is a challenge, I remember that just because I can't see any growth, my flowers are all still making progress, and by the time spring gets here, they will be beautiful. I expect the same to be true of my students. #Quote by Pamela Morsi

#168. I metaphor for sex, but she slapped my face and walked away when I asked. #Quote by Stephen King

#169. In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors. #Quote by Ymatruz

#170. How do you get your information, Mister Brekker?"
"You might say I'm a lockpick."
"You must be a very gifted one."
"I am indeed." Kaz leaned back slightly. "You see, every man is a safe, a vault of secrets and longings. Now, there are those who take the brute's way, but I prefer a gentler approach - the right pressure applied at the right moment, in the right place. It's a delicate thing."
"Do you always speak in metaphors, Mister Brekker?"
Kaz smiled. "It's not a metaphor."
He was out of his chair before his chains hit the ground. #Quote by Leigh Bardugo

#171. In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others - even policemen - have said that "the war on drugs is lost." But to demand a yes or no answer to the question "Is the war against drugs being won?" is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought. #Quote by Theodore Dalrymple

#172. You have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you're imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you're saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. #Quote by John Green

#173. Winter, I know you're used to batting your eyelashes at everyone who walks by and expecting them to fall in love with you, but that's not going to happen here. They are going to laugh at you and mock you and then they are going to - "

"Eat me. Yes. I understand."

"You don't seem to be grasping the meaning behind the words. This isn't a metaphor. I'm talking about huge teeth and digestive systems. #Quote by Marissa Meyer

#174. Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise. #Quote by Jeanette Winterson

#175. Web media needs to move to TV metaphor - with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads. #Quote by Nick Denton

#176. The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth. #Quote by Henry James

#177. Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations. #Quote by Steven Pinker

#178. In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come. #Quote by Natasha Trethewey

#179. We are not slaves to unconscious drives unless we insist on believing that the subconscious is weaker or less important or dumber than our logical skills, if we neglect it and don't dive in. The important task is to understand and modify the stories that are holding sway. You can't bully the prerational with the rational. You need to communicate with it on its level: myth, ritual, symbol, metaphor. #Quote by Jessa Crispin

#180. If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero's speeches are language as practical tool. #Quote by Thomas Cahill

#181. The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor. #Quote by Isaiah Berlin

#182. The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul. #Quote by Miranda July

#183. We are such materialists that all our metaphors are going to be material. #Quote by J. T. Walsh

#184. And metaphors like cats behind your smile,
Each one wound up to purr,
each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside ( ... ) #Quote by Ray Bradbury

#185. It's a metaphor for life. If sports don't matter, then life doesn't matter. #Quote by Emily Giffin

#186. I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting. #Quote by Olivia Sudjic

#187. The resurrection for Christians is not just a metaphor. It is real enough, but not in the sense that you could have taken a photograph of it had you been lurking around Jesus's tomb armed with a Kodak. Meanings and values are also real, but you cannot photograph them either. They are real in the same sense that a poem is real. #Quote by Terry Eagleton

#188. According to the mystics, the obscure matter that creation presupposes is nothing other than divine potentiality. The act of creation is God's descent into an abyss that is simply his own potentiality and impotentiality, his capacity to and capacity not to ... In this context, "abyss" is not a metaphor ... It is the life of darkness in God, the divine root of Hell in which the Nothing is eternally produced. Only when we succeed in sinking into this Tartarus and experiencing our own impotentiality do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets. #Quote by Giorgio Agamben

#189. Snowflake's journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly?
I have no freaking clue. #Quote by Special Snowflake

#190. Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. #Quote by E. M. Forster

#191. To the ancients, bears symbolized resurrection. The creature goes to sleep for a long time, its heartbeat decreases to almost nothing. The male often impregnates the female right before hibernation, but miraculously, egg and sperm do not unite right away. They float separately in her uterine broth until much later. Near the end of hibernation, the egg and sperm unite and cell division begins, so that the cubs will be born in the spring when the mother is awakening, just in time to care for and teach her new offspring. Not only by reason of awakening from hibernation as though from death, but much more so because the she-bear awakens with new young, this creature is a profound metaphor for our lives, for return and increase coming from something that seemed deadened.

The bear is associated with many huntress Goddesses: Artemis and Diana in Greece and Rome, and Muerte and Hecoteptl, mud women deities in the Latina cultures. These Goddesses bestowed upon women the power of tracking, knowing, 'digging out' the psychic aspects of all things. To the Japanese the bear is the symbol of loyalty, wisdom, and strength. In northern Japan where the Ainu tribe lives, the bear is one who can talk to God directly and bring messages back for humans. The cresent moon bear is considered a sacred being, one who was given the white mark on his throat by the Buddhist Goddess Kwan-Yin, whose emblem is the crescent moon. Kwan-Yin is the Goddess of Deep Compassion and the bear is her emiss #Quote by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

#192. There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.

To which they said then go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room as your roots may ruin the carpet.

He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.

But his parents said look it is fall.

Hilarious, obviously. That this is a "man" and not a child is important. I imagine someone in their late twenties still living with his parents and acting childish. He comes in and begins to play a game, he is a tree. His parents use the game as an excuse to kick him out of the house, playfully (but with a serious undercurrent) threatening him with expulsion. He sees this and feels threatened and ends the game, dropping his leaves. But his parents -- clever -- interpret his refusal to play as another part of the game, and now he is trapped in his own metaphor, unable to escape. The fall, of course, is the season in which things are done ripening and are ready for harvest, just as it is time for him to leave home. Games and metaphors are always more insidious than we know. #Quote by Russell Edson

#193. 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. #Quote by Elizabeth Edwards

#194. Depression, when it's clinical, is not a metaphor. It runs in families, and it's known to respond to medication and to counseling. However truly you believe there's a sickness to existence that can never be cured, if you're depressed you will sooner or later surrender and say: I just don't want to feel bad anymore. The shift from depressive realism to tragic realism, from being immobilized by darkness to being sustained by it, thus strangely seems to require believing in the possibility of a cure ... #Quote by Jonathan Franzen

#195. Sitting in seat 14A, in the sun, I float on a full-moon, tidal joy unlike anything I've ever experienced. I am getting incredibly high on a single, astounding fact: that it's always sunny above the clouds. Always. That every day on Earth- every day I have ever had- was secretly sunny after all ... I feel like I've just flown 600 miles per hour head-on into the most beautiful metaphor of my life: If you fly high enough, if you get above the clouds, it's never-ending summer. #Quote by Caitlin Moran

#196. 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. #Quote by Matthew De Abaitua

#197. But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. #Quote by John Updike

#198. Its a metaphor, you see. You put the killing in your mouth but you don't give it the power to kill. A metaphor. #Quote by John Green

#199. The HBS logo shone high above, a surrogate sun for the overcast day. #Quote by Jack Heath

#200. Interestingly, this speech by Prospero does not contrast the unreality of the stage with the solid, flesh-and-blood existence of real men and women. On the contrary, it seizes on the flimsiness of dramatic characters as a metaphor for the fleeting, fantasy-ridden quality of actual human lives. It is we who are made of dreams, not just such figments of Shakespeare's imagination as Ariel and Caliban. The cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces of this earth are mere stage scenery after all. #Quote by Terry Eagleton