A Quote by James Russell Lowell

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory. — © James Russell Lowell
Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
I'm still willing to continue living with the burden of this memory. Even though this is a painful memory, even though this memory makes my heart ache. Sometimes I almost want to ask God to let me forget this memory. But as long as I try to be strong and not run away, doing my best, there will finally be someday...there will be finally be someday I can overcome this painful memory. I believe I can. I believe I can do it. There is no memory that can be forgotten, there is not that kind of memory. Always in my heart.
I think that as poets, we can get away with stuff because we can ride on the melt of metaphor. We cover a lot of terrain psychically and temporally and linguistically via metaphor, and that can be a stand-in for an argument, whereas in prose, you have to make the argument, and you have to be convincing because the sequence must make sense in time and purpose.
One reason I chose gunpowder is that I had the good luck in my environment to be exposed to gunpowder. The other reason is I was always looking for a visual language that goes beyond the boundary of nations, and so I found gunpowder.
Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation.
South Central Los Angeles [is the] home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys.
I think, the argument sometimes that I've had with folks who are much more interested in sort of race-specific programs is less an argument about what is practically achievable and sometimes maybe more an argument of "We want society to see what's happened, and internalize it, and answer it in demonstrable ways." And those impulses I very much understand.
As a child, I remember my dad would sometimes drive me into town with him to play pinball machines together. It's a bittersweet memory but also a favorite.
I'm always oscillating between if I should sprinkle more gunpowder or less. But if I put too much gunpowder, there may be holes throughout the silk. If not enough, the power and energy would not be shown.
What I like about music is its ability to be convincing, to carry an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of the argument remain unknown quantities.
I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions.
Language is memory and metaphor.
If technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it?
You really can't go home again. Sometimes, that's a good thing. Sometimes, when you try, you find out that home isn't really there anymore... but that it wasn't only in your head before. Home actually existed. Home wasn't just a dream. Sometimes, that's the best thing of all.
I want to drive! I love to drive! I drive at home in Barbados.
Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world. You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown. The problem is the unknown is where I want to be.
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