Top 901 Metaphor Quotes & Sayings - Page 11

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

Sports remain a great metaphor for life's more difficult lessons. It was through athletics that many of us first came to understand that fear can be tamed; that on a team the whole is more than the sum of its parts; and that the ability to be heroic lies, to a surprising degree, within.

... I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

In the 1960s, reaching for the moon meant just that. It was a metaphor for attempting the impossible, and we attempted it, and we did it. And it inspired millions of people in every way. The number of science graduates in this country doubled in the 1960s at every level - high school, college, Ph.D.

The travel book is a convenient metaphor for life, with its optimistic beginning or departure, its determined striving, and its reflective conclusion. Journeys change travellers just as a good travel book can change readers.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water.

To me "King Kong" is a metaphor for America's fear of the black male. And to me that's obvious. All right? So I mean that was one of the first things I said when I was talking to a friend of mine after he saw Peter Jackson's version of "King Kong."

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.

Breastfeeding is an unsentimental metaphor for how love works, in a way. You don’t decide how much and how deeply to love - you respond to the beloved, and give with joy exactly as much as they want.

Instead of the metaphor of scales in balance, I prefer the idea of a jazz quartet: you're trying to make music that feels and sounds good, and sometimes you only hear the trumpet or just the bass and piano. Sometimes all four are playing at the same time, but perhaps at different volume.

The metaphor I've used is... somebody's going to push my family off a cliff pretty soon, and I won't be there to catch them. And that breaks my heart. But I have some time to sew some nets to cushion the fall. So, I can curl up in a ball and cry, or I can get to work on the nets.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

Dick Gregory used every syllable, every metaphor, every joke, every march, every incarceration, every hour of his life, to embarrass this country into providing a more perfect, perfect union.

The engine room really is a metaphor for my head, and all the things bangin' around, and I think I share that with a lot of people. A lot of memories, and a lot of hopes, and a lot of just dealing with the day-to-day. Sometimes it gets all abstract.

Speed bumps, I was thinking, you know, you're driving along, everything's OK, and then there's a speed bump to go, 'Slow down.' Go over it real slowly, and you hit the pedal, and you keep going, and I just thought it was kind of a nice metaphor for life.

Yoga is a metaphor for life. You have to take it really slowly. You can't rush. You can't skip to the next position. You find yourself in very humiliating situations, but you can't judge yourself. You just have to breathe, and let go. It is a workout for your mind, your body and your soul.

I am angry when I hear things like Cheney whispering into Bush's ear on the way to Obama's inauguration to ask him to pardon 'Scooter' Libby and not to 'leave a soldier on the battlefield'. What kind of metaphor is that for his petty partisan views, when you have men and women giving the ultimate sacrifice? I have nothing but contempt.

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.

I don't really know what it is about vampires that makes them such a powerful symbol, metaphor, whatever in people's consciousness. But I do know they're tremendously powerful. I mean, there's a vampire on 'Sesame Street.' And Count Chocula. I don't know why it's so powerful.

I really embrace things that I think people who like music can relate to, they grew up with the same stuff and know the same references so when they hear it being used as a metaphor to something else they'll be like that's unique, or funny or something that's relatable to me.

You write three pages over six hours, and you don't feel like you've gotten anywhere, but if you've done a beautiful metaphor or a lovely sentence, or you finally got to some moment you wanted, then that's worth it. Then you can close your computer and get a little relief.

'Triboluminescence' is actually a scientific world meaning striking something and creating light from dark. I thought it was a great word and that is was a very apt metaphor for making music - or any creative act, really. We all start in the dark and have to create light.

The voice within is what I'm married to. All marriage is a metaphor for that marriage. My lover is the place inside me where an honest yes and no come from. That's my true partner. It's always there. And to tell you yes when my integrity says no is to divorce that partner.

Basically, I really love work that puts the reader into a kind of vertigo, into a real doubt, and a beautiful way to convey that, a really perfect metaphor for that, is to make the reader also experience doubt.

The metaphor ( coaching) with sports is meant quite seriously... the coach stands back , observes the performance, and provides guidance. The coach applauds strengths, identifies weaknesses, points up principles, offers guiding and often inspiring imagery, and decides what kind of practice to emphasize.

In my mind, he was guilty of no error - he was chargeable with no exaggeration - he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said that all we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.

The continuing struggle was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: 'I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.' (138)

This is a comment on fear. Today it's like 'They're going to bomb the New York subway and there's the avian flu and 50 million of us are going to die.' We wanted to make fun of that fear-based culture we've been plunged into. And Halloweens the perfect metaphor for fear.

There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.

Beyond diversity, the story of Obama's influence on the courts is more complex. Indeed, it could serve as a metaphor for his Presidency: symbolically rich but substantively hazy. Obama took office after years of intense conservative focus on the courts.

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.'

"The River" [song] is also, yes, very metaphorical. Rivers are cleansing. As long as human beings have been on the Earth we've used rivers to cleanse ourselves. And, for me, the lyrics "something in the river," I think is - well, the river is a metaphor for where I was at the time.

Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.

'A mother must put on her oxygen mask first, in order to be able to help her children' - I see this instruction on airplanes as an appropriate metaphor for feminist mothering. Mothers, empowered, are able to better care for and protect their children

I love sports. Anytime I can combine sports with a film I'm a happy guy. It's such a natural fit, because sports always seems to be a metaphor for life. Always, always, always.

It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.

Metaphorically I am made of chairs. It's a metaphor though. That means I am not actually made of the chairs.

There's a great metaphor that one of my doctors uses: If a fish is swimming in a dirty tank and it gets sick, do you take it to the vet and amputate the fin? No, you clean the water. So, I cleaned up my system. By eating organic raw greens, nuts and healthy fats, I am flooding my body with enzymes, vitamins and oxygen.

I don't believe, in the end, that there is any such thing as no style. Even a very neutral, plain style, one that doesn't use colloquialisms, lyrical flourishes, heavy supplies of metaphor, etc., is a style, and it becomes a writer's characteristic style just as much as a thicker, richer deployment of idiom and vocabulary.

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.

Effective metaphor does more than shed light on the two things being compared. It actually brings to the mind's eye something that has never before been seen. It's not just the marriage ceremony linking two things; it's the child born from the union.

A system of metaphor (pointing to a higher power) that one takes inside oneself as the truth and through its rules one aligns ones inner and outer behavior, submitting ones ego or will to the will of a higher power.

The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation. I don't think I solve problems in my poetry; I think I uncover the problems.

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.

Mystical experiences nearly always lead one to a belief that some aspect of consciousness is imperishable. In a Buddhist metaphor the consciousness of the individual is like a flame that burns through the night. It is not the same flame over time, yet neither is it another flame.

I like the idea of watching the sun go down in the ocean. I've always felt comfortable about that, I like sunsets. There's something about a westward movement that seems fascinating, although the Irish refer to going West as a metaphor for dying. I see it differently.

It used to be that readers were relegated because they considered themselves far above society, and so the metaphor of the ivory tower developed. Now there's still this idea that the reader doesn't take part in the social game and in politics, the res publica, but for other reasons: he doesn't do it because he's not making any money.

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.

In the original introduction to the word meme in the last chapter of 'The Selfish Gene,' I did actually use the metaphor of a 'virus.' So when anybody talks about something going viral on the Internet, that is exactly what a meme is, and it looks as though the word has been appropriated for a subset of that.

The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.

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.

As a child I always loved traditional Korean masked dances. There is something magical about a mask because we all wear or hide behind a metaphoric mask, and ultimately underneath this metaphor is our true vulnerable core. I think we all want to reveal ourselves but can only do so when we feel we are safe.

I have always considered it a beautiful metaphor that Cervantes had no fixed address in Spain. He is thus everywhere and nowhere. There are a number of sites connected with his life, but none attract hordes of travellers the way Stratford-upon-Avon and the Globe Theatre in London draw Shakespeare aficionados.

On the much revered family of North American mythology - and a metaphor for the Ruling Alliance: Sacred family! .... The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.

It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.

I remember periods where we didn't even have beats in our club sets, but people kept dancing. The beat wasn't even necessary, because it was a biokinetic experience - that's our metaphor for the dance and the body and all its expressions. From today's point of view, this would be totally impossible.

The sci-fi movies I grew up with, the metaphor was very rich, and they used to really mean something: David Cronenberg's films, or John Carpenter's films, or the Phil Kaufman and Don Segel versions of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,' or George Romero's early zombie films.