Metaphor Quotations

I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk.

Hiroshima has become a metaphor not just for nuclear war but for war and destruction and violence toward civilians. It's not just the idea we should not use nuclear arms. We should not start another war because it's madness.

I'm a believer in getting punched in the face. I know it sounds cliched, but to me, fighting is a metaphor for life.

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

I've spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that's only the starting point.

'Safe Harbor' is a state of mind... it's the place - in reality or metaphor - to which one goes in times of trouble or worry. It can be a friendship, marriage, church, garden, beach, poem, prayer, or song.

In 'Gravity,' nearly everything is a metaphor for the main character. The way I tend to approach a film is that character and background are equally important; one informs the other. Here, Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity.

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.

I realized that food was actually a metaphor for bringing us all together. It's about us communicating and being like family.

Vampires are total sexual metaphors; there's just no way around that.

Whether it's New York or somewhere else, the metaphor of 'Avenue Q,' which is the place you live when you can't afford to live anywhere else - and we've all been through that in our journey. As I always say, at any moment I could be back on Avenue Q if I pick the wrong show.

Cities are obvious metaphors for life. We call roads arteries and so forth.

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.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

'Matterhorn' is my metaphor of the Vietnam War - we built it, we abandoned it, we assaulted it, we lost, and then we abandoned it again.

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives.

I do genuinely believe that young people who play sport at a competitive level, sensibly controlled, sensibly organised, that has to be a good thing. It will teach them to win, it will teach them to lose with dignity and magnanimity - all the things you want. It's a pretty good metaphor for life.

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

The family is changing not disappearing. We have to broaden our understanding of it, look for the new metaphors.

Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.

I heard my name associated with the Peter Pan syndrome more than once. But really, what's so wrong with Peter Pan? Peter Pan flies. He is a metaphor for dreams and faith.

What draws me in is that a trip is a leap in the dark. It's like a metaphor for life. You set off from home, and in the classic travel book, you go to an unknown place. You discover a different world, and you discover yourself.

'Fargo' becomes a metaphor for a type of true crime case where truth is stranger than fiction. So, there's no reason that there isn't another 10-hour true crime story that could be told in this region.

The whole concept of the devil is a metaphor on one level.

In a way, the road between Huaraz and the lodge is a metaphor for Peruvian politics. It used to be in good repair, and in some places still is.

We speak of 'software eating the world,' 'the Internet of Things,' and we massify 'data' by declaring it 'Big.' But these concepts remain for the most part abstract. It's hard for many of us to grasp the impact of digital technology on the 'real world' of things like rocks, homes, cars, and trees. We lack a metaphor that hits home.

Right now, I'm standing behind the glass, and I guess that's a metaphor for how my life will be going forward.

I went out on a date with Simile. I don't know what I metaphor.

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

When I was researching the Victorian anti-vaccination movement, those activists often used a vampire as a metaphor for the vaccinator.

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.

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry.

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

I couldn't have come up with a better metaphor for my life and my internal conflict. It amazes me how quickly we can manifest our fears; not only had I created my 'I'm never satisfied, I'll drive her away' nightmare.

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.

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool.

'Crash' is a metaphor for what I see as the dehumanizing elements that are present in the world in which we live. We're distanced by the nature of the society we inhabit from a normal human reaction.

My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.

Our home, just like our garden, evolves. We experiment, try out different things and new colors until we feel content. Try to keep the metaphor of home as garden in your consciousness.

As adults, when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness.

In my own life, I believe it was an early education in poetical metaphor that helped me to grapple with and make sense of all the difficult and traumatic things that were to come.

The very name 'Manson' has become a metaphor for evil... He has come to represent the dark and malignant side of humanity, and for whatever reason, there is a side of human nature that is fascinated with ultimate evil.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.

My hope is that the music will serve as a metaphor for the actions taken by the inhabitants of this wonderful planet as a call for world harmony on all levels.

I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.

I know that I'm going to die and that you're going to die. I can't do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.

My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever.

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.

I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.

When the Somalians were merely another hungry third world people, we sent them guns. Now that they are falling down dead from starvation, we send them troops. Some may see in this a tidy metaphor for the entire relationship between north and south. But it would make a whole lot more sense nutritionally -- as well as providing infinitely more vivid viewing -- if the Somalians could be persuaded to eat the troops.

I would say to those who don't like the metaphor This is reality.

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.

Life is a metaphor for what's happening in your consciousness.

I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

Hands, the perfect metaphor for Barry Avrich's visual masturbation,

But the greatest injury of the 'wall' notion is its mischievous diversion of judges from the actual intentions of the drafters of the Bill of Rights. . . . The "wall of separation between church and state" is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.

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

I think they would be foolish not to support WAP. They're trying to push Web Clipping as a metaphor for surfing the Web, but I don't think they'll be that successful.

We are now part of a bass community. You came here today by yourself, now you're part of a family, a network. The bass circle works as a metaphor for that.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.

Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?

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.

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.

The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.

Under his (Marc Chagall, ed.) sole impulse metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

They see me as a symbol, and not a human being. That way they can kill me, say it’s not murder it’s a metaphor.

It was easier than explaining DiMaggio's use as a metaphor.

We used beach access as a metaphor for this issue. People for the most part can stroll around and use the beach. We think the preserves should have the same thing.

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.

I talk a lot in metaphors. I get my words out but sometimes they don't make sense.

50 Cent is a metaphor for "change". But originally it was a gangster from Fort Greene Projects named 50 Cent and I took the name when he passed and because he's not active, I thought it'd be cool to take it.

Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

The cure for mixed metaphors, I have always found, is for the patient to be obliged to draw a picture of the result.

Any supreme insight is a metaphor.

I somewhat resist the whole gay rights-vampire rights metaphor because it is fraught with problems. I don't want to be seen as a gay man as a blood-sucking killer. I don't think it is the way to win hearts and minds.

The shoes are a metaphor for these two women who have the kind of dynamic that a lot of women have with each other where one is thinner, the other is smarter. One is more attractive, the other has more money.

The Sacrament of the Eucharist is, of course, one step away from the Incarnation itself, where the thing signified (The Word) and the signifier (Jesus) were absolutely one. Symbol and sign and metaphor strain towards this union; Sacrament presents it, but the Incarnation is that perfect union. Again, it is a scandal. God is not man, any more than bread is flesh. But faith overrides the implacable prudence of logic and chemistry and says "Lo!

The river is a metaphor for life in general, ... all the bullshit that you deal with from being a kid growing up. The whole thing's just about life and death.

It was a chance to do a film reflecting our phobias today, our fear of terrorism or disaster, like 9-11 or whatever nature can do to us. A natural disaster like this is sort of a metaphor for the impossible and most disastrous thing you can imagine, and what would we do when it hits?

What happens in Kitchener-Waterloo in knowledge creation and dissemination and creation of high-value innovation is a metaphor for the 21st-century Canadian economy.

We all struggle. Life is not fun. A lot of times, it's really painful and hard. Sometimes it's really funny. 'Foxcatcher' is kind of like a metaphor for that.

Branson is a metaphor for red state America,

That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.

This relates to my other work and fits into a long line of thinking. I am using furniture here as a metaphor for bodies,

In an interesting way, the operation becomes almost a metaphor for hope and optimism. A little child can have a new face with a smile restored, and suddenly his mother's smile is restored and his father's and the outer family's... and they bring him back to the village and the village is delighted... The ripples and effects of this are fantastic.

I'm thinking about where we are right now in history. The other common theme to this record is that the songs all put stuff I find important out on the table. Less metaphor and more me.

I made a $50 bet -- a lot of money then -- with my coach that I'd win a medal. I woke up that morning and thought, 'don't get to the bottom and wish you had a second chance, because in the Olympics, you don't get a second chance.' I was so in the moment; I wanted to feel it, I wanted to be in it -- I've used that metaphor for the rest of my life.

If you could actually get rid of your special power which alienates you from the rest of the world, would you do it? It's a metaphor very much about intolerance, I think, fear of anything that's different. If you could choose to not be Jewish or not be gay or not be African-American. Life maybe is not as easy if you're a minority. Would you take the opportunity to change that if you could?

If you look around the building now you can see a whole bunch of posters of orangutans which students put up saying, 'we're not orangutans.' But I think he got it right, it just took a while for people to understand the difference between metaphor and hard technical descriptions.