Great Metaphor Quotes

#1. As accurate as a blind man pissing during an earthquake."
"Wow ... ," I breathed.
She frowned at me.
"That was a great metaphor," I said.
"Oh please."
"I need to write that down," I said, ignoring her complaints, fishing for my new mobile to type it out.

Brandon Sanderson

#2. The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.

Simone Weil

#3. I really just wanted to make sure my psychotic, sleep-deprived husband wasn't wrestling hellhounds. That would have been a great metaphor if it weren't real. I'd have to remember it. Use it metaphorically later.

Darynda Jones

#4. Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me ... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.

Werner Herzog

#5. Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something's time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.

Henry Cloud

#6. Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.

Vivian Gornick

#7. You know what's a great metaphor for love? Sleeping beauty. Because you have to plow through this incredible thicket of thorns in order to get to beauty, and even then, when you get there, you still have to wake her up.
- Tiny Cooper

David Levithan

#8. Famous revolutionary,' you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#9. It's a metaphor of human bloody existence, a dragon. And if that wasn't bad enough, it's also a bloody great hot flying thing.

Terry Pratchett

#10. Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.
All are continually asking, "What does this represent? What does it stand for?"
They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When they get to that level, they will try to go deeper again.

Steven Pressfield

#11. Life's a climb. But the view is great.

Miley Cyrus

#12. It was Vyasa's genius to take the whole great Mahabharata epic and see it as metaphor for the perennial war between the forces of light and the forces of darkness in every human heart.

Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

#13. I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

Mark O'Connell

#14. Sports is a metaphor for overcoming obstacles and achieving against great odds. Athletes, in times of difficulty, can be important role models.

Bill Bradley

#15. I'm super happy to see the record doing its thing and for people to like it, but for me, I had a great victory just as a person. I overstepped countless obstacles by creating that record. And the record's a metaphor for the personal steps I [took] throughout the past year.

Justin Vernon

#16. He did not recognize himself either. He was a totally new being, bald, covered with grease and blood, pink and blue eyed: he was his own baby ... He was a great fat chuckling baby, and he shat and peed in his filthy trousers and kept driving.

Peter Straub

#17. A great artist paints a picture on the canvas of his mind using the colors of his love and imagination before transferring the image onto a real canvas.

Debasish Mridha

#18. I discovered the fun of genre is ... you get to explore your fears, and you get to use the metaphor of the genre - whether it's a giant monster or a ... 12-year-old vampire. Whatever it is, you can sink something underneath the surface and make a personal film under the guise of great fun romp.

Matt Reeves

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

Geoffrey Wood

#20. Training for me is a metaphor for life, period. The dedication, the determination, the desire, the work ethic, the great successes and the great failures - I take that into life.

Dwayne Johnson

#21. The heart pointed to the brain and said with great disdain, "Those who live their lives in here live the lives most full of fear.

Ryan Lilly

#22. But Julia hasn't a bit of tact; and men, I find, require a great deal. They purr if you rub them the right way and spit if you don't. (That isn't a very elegant metaphor. I mean it figuratively.)

Jean Webster

#23. Gardening is peaceful, yet there is a great element of failure. It's the perfect metaphor for life
a lot of pleasure, then it's over. There's great satisfaction in tending something, feeling it needs you, even if it's just a plant on your windowsill.

Jane Kaczmarek

#24. Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.

Jean Houston

#25. 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.

Andrew Bird

#26. Like students of art who walk around a great statue, seeing parts and aspects of it from each position, but never the whole, we must walk mentally around time, using a variety of approaches, a pandemonium of metaphor.

Robert Grudin

#27. There's a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.
What our contempts doth often hurl from us,
We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,
By revolution lowering, does become
The opposite of itself. She's good, being gone.
The hand could pluck her back that shoved her on.

William Shakespeare

#28. I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.

Brandon Sanderson

#29. I loved the world of roller derby because I thought it was such an empowering metaphor, that you get out there and do it. It's such a rocker, athletic, capable, cool exhibitionist sport; it's about this great sort of camaraderie.

Drew Barrymore

#30. Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life.
The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan.
The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.

Jaimal Yogis

#31. The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light ... It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within that great general light of existence.

Marilynne Robinson