Metaphor Quotes

A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back.

Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.

When, like an Emir of tyrannic power,Sirius appears, and on the horizon blackBids countless stars pursue their mighty track.

Kites rise highest against the wind - not with it.

If it never rained, nothing would grow.

The storm starts, when the drops start dropping. When the drops stop dropping then the storm starts stopping.

If you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun.

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.

Poetry is play. I'd even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.

A sleeping bag is a tortilla for a human.

Clouds are like boogers hanging on the nostrils of the moon.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

She eyes me like a pisces.

He is like a female llama surprised in her bath.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.

For your popular rumour, unlike the rolling stone of the proverb, is one which gathers a deal of moss in its wanderings up and down.

Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries.

The game of life does not proceed like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes they make five, or minus four, and sometimes the blackboard topples over in the middle of the sum and the pedagogue is left with a black eye.

You are the sky. The clouds are what happens, what comes and goes.

Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.

The river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper.

The most excellent symbol of the people is the paving stone. One walks on it until it falls on one's head.

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn't make them Kobe Bryant.

The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.

The Earth is like one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin.

...every offensive lost its force as it proceeded. It was like throwing a bucket of water over the floor. It first rushed forward, then soaked forward, and finally stopped altogether until another bucket could be brought.

The drought was the very worst when the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

I have this table in my new house. They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked. I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through.

Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon or star.

Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.

Balloonists have an unsurpassed view of the scenery, but there is always the possibility that it may collide with them.

Strong currents drag many stones and bushes along with them, strong intellects many dense and muddled minds.

The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life - or at least the way life should be.

Losing love is like a window in your heart.

Veels vithin veels, a prison in a prison.

A wave in the ocean is a wave, only in so far as it is bound by name and form.

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn't even begun to pull out the knife.

The budget is like a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, then reaches in and tries to pull real ones out.

If a pig could give his mind to anything, he would not be a pig.

Life is like a ship. There's people dancing on a ship.There's a lot of money on the ship, but I cannot integrate on the ship or get equality on the ship.And I never could. I'm just in the galley working and I never could get up to see the captain of the ship.

If you remember only one thing I've said, remember that an idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor. If you have never made a good metaphor, then you don't know what it's all about.

Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead

Women are silver dishes into which we put golden apples.

Pressure makes diamonds

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

At one time or another, almost every politician needs an honest man so badly that, like a ravenous wolf, he breaks into a sheep-fold: not to devour the ram he has stolen, however, but rather to conceal himself behind its wooly back.