Top 56 Best Metaphor Quotes
#1. You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job.
Keith Rabois
#2. Far from being the rock or island in the Simon and Garfunkel song, it turns out that the best metaphor to describe the human body is 'sponge.
Rick Smith
#3. Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.
E. M. Forster
#4. 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
#5. My words are like Mummy: butterflies trapped inside a net.
Holly Bodger
#6. I was convinced that she was about to tell me my card was declined, and assumed Derek wanting to talk later meant he'd soon be telling me our life was declined. Everything, everyone had reached their limits with me.
Joshua Mohr
#7. In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.
Tabitha King
#8. No! he wanted to cry out. No, Tania, please come back. What can I leave her with, what can I say, what one word can I leave with her, for her? What one word for my wife?
"Tatiasha," Alexander called after her. God, what was the curator's name ... ?
She glanced back.
"Remember Orbeli-
Paullina Simons
#10. I feel as much of a stud as ... I can't come up with a metaphor. That's how lacking in studliness I am.
Dan Wakefield
#11. The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#12. Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary
Gerald Edelman
#13. I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
Mother Teresa
#14. You are a fluid metaphor for existence. You are your own death and your own rebirth. Here is forever. It never changes. We bring perpetual oblivion until we change the world.
Frederick Lenz
#15. Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body - the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman's body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn't lie.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#16. I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.
David Levithan
#17. (aside) Oh, you are well tuned now,
But I'll set down the pegs that make this music,
As honest as I am.
William Shakespeare
#18. In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.
Hanya Yanagihara
#19. It's a wonder you don't see the zebra being trotted out as a metaphor for racial harmony more often.
Dov Davidoff
#20. Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
R.S. Thomas
#21. 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.
Jordan Wolfson
#22. When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.
Will Cotton
#23. 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.
Joshua Mohr
#24. We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.
Rick Perlstein
#25. In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors.
Ymatruz
#26. In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer's 1928 'The Passion of Joan of Arc,' one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
Steve Erickson
#27. To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you ... a truth ... that used to elude you.
Norman Mailer
#28. 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.
Christopher Moore
#29. The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us.
John Williams
#32. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.
David Lehman
#33. Together a brick and a blanket create the perfect metaphor for life. Will you be a brick and make something of your life, or be a blanket and sleep your life away?
Amy Summers
#34. What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?"
"No, Julius. It's the end of the circus."
"I see. And these are the clowns?"
Foaly's head poked through the doorway.
"Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?
Eoin Colfer
#35. Basically, my vagina was a metaphor for my empty heart and it needed to be filled before I decided that my stomach was also a metaphor and I ate my way through this whole situation.
Britt Hayes
#36. But I came to see that Las Vegas is not a freak but is, instead, deeply integrated with the rest of the country, and the world beyond. It is symptom, mirror, metaphor.
Timothy O'Grady
#37. Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.
Sharon Olds
#38. I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk.
Tift Merritt
#40. Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside.
Marie Rutkoski
#41. The saying "the cherry on top" is only a good metaphor if the person listening or reading actually likes cherries on top of their ice cream.
Christopher Jones
#42. Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.
James Geary
#43. ... 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
#44. Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
-Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)
Ani DiFranco
#45. My master gives me bread and beer and every good thing.
Garret Keizer
#46. I hate metaphors. That's why my favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a good, simple tale about a man who hates an animal.
Ron Swanson
#47. I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.
Mark Nepo
#48. Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
Zora Neale Hurston
#49. All the world's a stage," is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage.
Stephen Davis
#50. I've always felt a kinship with Willy Wonka. Even at that age, I could tell that he was a flawed hero, an icon for the forbidden. The forbidden in this case was chocolate, a metaphor for indulgence and anything you're not supposed to have, be it sex, drugs, alcohol or pornography.
Marilyn Manson
#51. The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.
Tim Winton
#52. And I have faith that you'll make a wonderful head of the Council someday, Sophie.
Yeah, except for that whole sleeping with the enemy part, I thought. Wait, not that I would actually be sleeping with ... I mean, it's a metaphor. There would only be metaphorical sleeping.
Rachel Hawkins
#53. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
Paul Valery
#54. It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself
Nick Hornby
#55. Football is very masculine and, to me, a metaphor for war.
Jane Lynch
#56. I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
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