Top 100 Metaphor Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk.
Tift Merritt
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.
James Geary
#13. ... 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
#15. My master gives me bread and beer and every good thing.
Garret Keizer
#16. 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
#17. I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.
Mark Nepo
#18. Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
Zora Neale Hurston
#19. All the world's a stage," is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage.
Stephen Davis
#20. 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
#21. The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.
Tim Winton
#22. 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
#23. If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.
Joseph Campbell
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Football is very masculine and, to me, a metaphor for war.
Jane Lynch
#27. I like ice hockey. No one is ever going to ask me to write about that as a metaphor for life.
Steven Pinker
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. My words are like Mummy: butterflies trapped inside a net.
Holly Bodger
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
Mother Teresa
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. (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
#43. 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
#44. It's a wonder you don't see the zebra being trotted out as a metaphor for racial harmony more often.
Dov Davidoff
#45. Piled on grief' referred to the iron the smith was beating, since (on his interpretation of the metaphor) the discovery of iron brought grief to men.
Anonymous
#47. Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.
John Le Carre
#48. This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.
Bryant A. Loney
#49. I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.
Alan Garner
#50. If you're going to while away the years, it's far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive then in a fog, and I believe # running helps you to do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life,
Haruki Murakami
#51. Its a metaphor, you see. You put the killing in your mouth but you don't give it the power to kill. A metaphor.
John Green
#52. And I too am not myself, hoping for refuge in a metaphor that will contain it all.
Helon Habila
#53. The claim in Psalms that "the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims His works" (Psalms 19:2) is not a mere metaphor. The study of nature, even with all its intellectual rigor, is filled with spiritual wonder.
Gerald Schroeder
#54. I like zombie movies. I like 'The Walking Dead;' I like the metaphor of it, simply because when we go with the zombie concept - if you're bitten by a zombie, you don't transform into something else like a vampire or a werewolf or whatever. You become something that's not you.
Marilyn Manson
#55. We are not just tickling the dragon's tail; we are timing a flyby through its open jaws while it is yawning.
Marko Kloos
#56. 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
#57. In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.
Craig Raine
#58. Life is a journey, the metaphor guides you to some conclusions: You should learn the terrain, pick a direction, find some good traveling companions, and enjoy the trip, because there may be nothing at the end of the road.
Jonathan Haidt
#59. In this metaphor we actually have a picture of the computational universe, a metaphor which I hope to make scientifically precise as part of a research program.
Seth Lloyd
#60. The 1947 Court (Everson v. Board of Education) for the first time had used only Jefferson's metaphor - completely divorced from its context and intent.
David Barton
#61. I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right.
C.P. Snow
#62. Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#63. Not taking the Bible (or other texts based on 'revealed truths') literally leaves it up to the reader to cherry-pick elements for belief. There exists no guide for such cherry-picking, and zero religious sanction for it.
Jeffrey Tayler
#64. 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
#65. They say the eyes are the window to the soul.
Wendy Mass
#66. He sips his drink and it leaves his handlebar mustache dripping like a cattle dog come outta a river.
Erin Bowman
#67. Yeah, well, maybe magic's like that. Metaphor made real.
Gemma Files
#68. 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
#69. You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
Jane Hirshfield
#70. But people need to cling to something," Oshima says. "They have to. You're doing the same, even though you don't realize it. It's like Goethe said: Everything's a metaphor.
Haruki Murakami
#71. I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
Jandy Nelson
#72. 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
#73. We are a people captivated by the power and romance of metaphor, forever seeking the invisible through the image of the visible.
Lewis H. Lapham
#74. "Lurking" is one metaphor that the Omniscience has allowed us to borrow.
Larry Wall
#75. I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.
Milan Kundera
#76. It's so much easier to shut the refrigerator door, which is totally a metaphor, I realize, for my life
Matthew Quick
#77. I think the central metaphor of the movie is this notion of what the advertising industry does. In order to make someone want to buy something, they first have to make them feel bad about who they are in order to sell them that thing which will make them whole again, and happy again.
Jennifer Beals
#78. Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
Phillip Adams
#79. Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust. And if a guy is paying attention to you, he wants to have sex with you.
Oliver Markus
#80. People have been told so often that resurrection is just a metaphor, and means Jesus died and was glorified - in other words, he went to Heaven, whatever that means. And they've never realized that the word 'resurrection' simply didn't mean that.
N. T. Wright
#81. Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.
Mahmoud Darwish
#82. 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
#83. The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
Hannah Arendt
#84. By the time you kill and mount what you catch, it has lost that very thing that made it worth having. I knew this only as a vague sense of disappointment at age 10; not until later did I recognize it as a metaphor for much of life.
Anna Quindlen
#85. If you believe that I'm a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.
Ice-T
#86. The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.
Kurt Vonnegut
#87. When we are feeling at a loss in a poem, metaphor comes to the rescue. Metaphor is instructive, tactical, and interactive; it succeeds when its audience sees it as both strange and true. We need metaphor to make the error that allows us to reach beyond ourselves.
Ann Townsend
#89. The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.
Aberjhani
#90. When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away, took my stance away, took my strength away. I was there buck naked, humiliated, sitting in my own crap and urine - this is a metaphor. My ego had run off. Your ego is the biggest coward.
Tim Allen
#91. Anyone who is serious about jiu-jitsu should know that the ability to defeat an opponent is nothing more than a metaphor for the ultimate combat, for the most significant victories are the ones we accomplish within ourselves
Rorion Gracie
#92. Hayley was being nice. And had made a successful metaphor.
Death was surely near.
Kathy Hepinstall
#93. 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
#94. Culture is like the visible and invisible levels of an iceberg -"the solid state of "water.
Pearl Zhu
#95. 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
#96. I'm interested in machines that make you aware of the process of seeing and aware of what you do when you construct the world by looking. This is interesting in itself, but more as a broad-based metaphor for how we understand the world.
William Kentridge
#97. Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there's nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.
China Mieville
#98. The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#99. To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous
Yukio Mishima
#100. Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.
James Wood
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