Top 100 Metaphor In Quotes
#1. Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.
Frank Gehry
#2. I see money as a reflection of how much impact you're having on the world. I see money as a metaphor in a way.
Paul Reed Smith
#3. Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experience from one mode into another. Money is metaphor in the sense that it stores skill and labour and also translates one skill into another.
Marshall McLuhan
#4. Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
John Berger
#5. There's a metaphor in that somewhere - like all of life is about ending up somewhere you didn't expect, and learning to just be happy with it.
Lauren Oliver
#6. The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.
Martin Gardner
#7. Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.
Agustin Gomez-Arcos
#8. Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a
red flag to a bu ... was like putting something very annoying in front of
someone who was annoyed by it.
Terry Pratchett
#9. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Northrop Frye
#10. There, at the centre, are the artists who really form the consciousness of their time; they respond deeply, intuitively to what is happening, what has happened, and what will happen, and their response is expressed in metaphor, in image and in fable.
John Wain
#11. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.
Jane Austen
#12. The true magic of novels dwells within us individually. Each reader will interpret every single character, scene, and metaphor in a slightly different way
Carl Henegan
#13. I ought to be more hardboiled; I'd like to be. I don't think I have it in me. To write in clipped sentences. To employ gritty metaphor in the introduction of sultry blondes ... I can't do it, so why bother trying?
Jesse Kellerman
#14. A tree is such a rich metaphor in a million beautiful ways. You can consider a tree growing and consider its connectedness to all things above and under the ground.
Ann Brashares
#15. My faith teaches me that the path to join souls in love must of necessity involve a crucifixion, and I think there's a metaphor in there for marriage.
Donald Miller
#16. Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.
Peter Greenaway
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
Mother Teresa
#22. 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
#23. In short, if you are using a shovel to dig yourself into a hole, a credit card company will be happy to give you a backhoe.
Jason G. Miller
#24. The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody's metaphors for it; I'd said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.
Brandon Sanderson
#25. Face, to me, is a metaphor of sadness. And I want to share this sadness. I'm not really interested whether it's an Indian face or not - that's not as important for me. But it's still important to establish the relationships in order to bring about a consciousness of our fragility.
Luis Gonzalez
#27. In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.
Olivia Sudjic
#28. Our sense of justice depends on our sense of time. Justice is a phenomenon only of consciousness, because time spread out in a spatial succession is its very essence. And this is possible only in a spatial metaphor of time.
Julian Jaynes
#29. [Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby .
Larry Wall
#30. It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow
such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father's fist.
Elissa Janine Hoole
#32. He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course - the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was.
Haruki Murakami
#33. I don't know how you look at the inside of your head - what metaphor you choose - but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.
James St. James
#34. As time passes in Heaven, the stars do not change places, not till the day when Zig changes the complete backdrop. I tell my students this is a metaphor for life; we go along thinking nothing will be different, till the day everything suddenly changes at once.
Neil Smith
#35. 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
#36. 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.
Matthew De Abaitua
#37. I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.
Reza Aslan
#38. The most colossal display of wise, inspiring,
and humorous metaphors ever exhibited in one place.
Richard Lederer
#39. An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.
Carl Jung
#40. But that's life right? It's just a shitty hand of cards. But then maybe somebody pulls out an Ace, and somebody else gets a four, or a ten. It's all in the draw and how you play it.
Mackenzie Herbert
#41. Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.
Edward Hirsch
#42. Stir not the bitterness in the cup that I mixed for myself,' said Denethor. 'Have I not tasted it now many nights upon my tongue, foreboding that worse lay in the dregs?
J.R.R. Tolkien
#43. A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.
Denis Donoghue
#44. In the Garden of Eden, Eve wore a fig leaf, not to cover her moist parts, but to draw Adam's gaze to what lay hidden in the undergrowth. Extending the metaphor, the snake symbolizes Adam's tongue, the apple the rosy, blood-engorged bundle of nerve endings pulsing within Eve's clitoris.
Chloe Thurlow
#45. Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
Barbara Kingsolver
#46. Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.
Joanne Harris
#47. All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.
Haruki Murakami
#48. Interesting is when one can produce a picture that is pretty, but with undercurrents. The metaphor that comes to mind is in the poems of Robert Frost.
Jamie Wyeth
#49. If you're looking for a spiritual allegory in the style of C.S. Lewis, I guess you could piece something together with Lorne Michaels as a symbol for God and my struggles with hair removal as a metaphor for virtue
Tina Fey
#50. I have to hold that up as a metaphor for everything, being prepared and then being brave enough to just be there. Just listen and follow, maybe jump. Everyone leans in, it brings them into your emotional vicinity because, you said "Risk creates intimacy
Mary-Louise Parker
#51. These words: migrant birds, arriving from distant places with story and metaphor caught in their feathers;
Robert Macfarlane
#52. Every time I write these words they become a taboo,
Making sure my punctuation curve, every letter here's true,
Living my life in the margin, and that metaphor was proof.
Kendrick Lamar
#53. 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
#54. The mist hung in the air like a prancing unicorn.
Graham Joyce
#55. in our culture, women can do anything a man can. and vice versa."
don alfonso's eyebrows shot up. "i do not believe it."
"it's true," sally said defiantly.
"in America, the women hunt while the men have babies?
Douglas Preston
#56. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in slang, which does not contain a lesson.
Victor Hugo
#57. 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.
Margaret Atwood
#58. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#59. 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
#60. Butterflies in your stomach. That was such a crappy metaphor. More like killer bees.
Kami Garcia
#61. Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.
Robert McKee
#62. Function and man appear synonymous because the function can only be pointed toward by being the function. There is no being except in a mode of being. [ ... ] Both scholar and Christian are functioning in identical ways, just under different metaphor, and both are evading the mechanics of being.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
#63. The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.
F.L. Lucas
#64. When I write in Italian - this is just the metaphor that came to me immediately, and I really think this is what it is - I feel like I'm writing with my left hand. Because of that weakness, there is this enormous freedom that comes with it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#65. A myth ... is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth.
Christopher Vogler
#67. Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.
Lev Grossman
#68. Violent ground-acquisition games such as football are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war.
Robert Downey Jr.
#69. Love is like a pane of glass.. It can take harsh beatings from the weather around it ... But if it gets hit in the right place it shatters.. And when you try to pick it up ... You end up getting cut.
Tyler Hoyt
#70. Generally in life, knowledge is acquired to be used. But school learning more often fits Freire's apt metaphor: knowledge is treated like money, to be put away in a bank for the future.
Seymour Papert
#71. I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives.
Frances Mayes
#72. I'm going to destroy you, little man!" Sourcefield yelled after me. "I'll rip you apart like a piece of tissue paper in a hurricane!"
"Wow," I said, reaching an intersection and taking cover by an old mailbox.
"What?" Tia asked.
"That was a really good metaphor.
Brandon Sanderson
#73. The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.
Alexandra Kleeman
#74. Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.
Joe Hill
#75. Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto Bolano
#76. Maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems
maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.
Jodi Picoult
#77. '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
Andrea O'Reilly
#78. ...explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.
Rebecca Solnit
#79. Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A
Kim Stanley Robinson
#80. God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.
Christina, Queen Of Sweden
#81. The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
Northrop Frye
#82. A satyagrahi may not ride two horses, truth and untruth, at the same time, nor, to change the metaphor, trim his sail to catch every breeze as you do in the name of communism.
Mahatma Gandhi
#83. Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
James Russell Lowell
#84. A metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.
Max Black
#85. Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
Robert Frost
#86. The debt ceiling debacle is almost a horrible metaphor: It's as if a bomb went off at 800 Pennsylvania Avenue and sent shrapnel flying in every direction. I don't know what these guys think they're doing, but it looks like they're committing political suicide.
Charlie Cook
#87. 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
#88. We use the metaphor of waves that rise and fall in societies, perhaps forgetting that the actual waves of the ocean are purely opportunistic, small irregularities in water that, snagging a fortunate gust, rise and break like monsters, for no greater cause than their own accidental invention.
Adam Gopnik
#89. There's an undeniable pleasure in stepping into an open-top sports car driven by a beautiful woman. It feels like you're climbing into a metaphor.
Hugh Laurie
#90. Perhaps Calder's secret lies in the idea that each mobile is, truly, a metaphor for the experience of living, for the interconnected movement of separate elements that make up a life. Each mobile tells us to stop, to wonder, to wonder some more, and to celebrate.
Blue Balliett
#91. If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety - as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.
Daniel Smith
#92. WARNING: This little book is a bullet to the head. Or, for a less violent metaphor, this is the door marked EXIT. You can either go through and beyond or just know it's there, waiting for you, ever-present for when you're in need of a way out.
Graham Ellis
#93. 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
#95. For the perception of the beautiful we have the term "taste"
a metaphor taken from that which is passive in the body and transferred to that which is active in the mind.
Thomas Reid
#97. The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites
man and woman, good and evil
are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell
#98. Since events are not metaphors, the literal-minded have a certain advantage in dealing with them.
Mason Cooley
#99. 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.
Madonna Ciccone
#100. Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new and complex things in relation to the things we already know ... once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.
Jonathan Haidt
