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.
The doctor I would want for myself or for anyone else I cared about would be one who understands that disease is more than just a clinical entity; it is an experience and a metaphor, with a message that must be listened to.
That term, ‘David and Goliath,’ has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
Science fiction, in its purest form, for me, it works the best when it’s being used as metaphor to look at something from a one-step-removed process, to give a little objectivity and insight into something that, if you were applying it on the face of it, we’d all be too close to.
Being a superhero is a metaphor for a job that is overwhelming.
I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing – playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.
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.
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.
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.
When I discovered metaphor and what it meant, I got really excited. That was what really pushed me through into music.
Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Most songwriters who have been lucky enough to have their song on the radio or be heard widely don’t know anything about science. The best songs have a strong dose of metaphor. Most songs about science don’t have that. Like ‘She Blinded Me With Science.’ It’s a stupid song, no offense to Thomas Dolby.
The vampire movies I embraced as a kid used vampirism as a metaphor that expressed deep sadness and a lot of human qualities.
Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor.
In my mind, there’s usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don’t want to enforce that on other people. I think that’s why I like using metaphor so much.
Right now, I’m standing behind the glass, and I guess that’s a metaphor for how my life will be going forward.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
When I first started painting candyland imagery, I was looking for the best possible metaphor for everything that is pleasure, desire and insatiability.
My goal is to create a metaphor that changes our reality by charming people into considering their world in a different way.
I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that’s all I know. I think people miss that.
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 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.
It’s really easy to hide in metaphor or hide in a solo or instrumentation, but when you’re saying explicitly this is how I feel it’s a bit different – it makes you a more vulnerable person.
Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.
I remember from my father’s funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
There’s this poet named Walter Benton, I really like his stuff. He always uses landscapes as a metaphor for the female body.
I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life’s mystery and unpredictability, of life’s generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can’t think without metaphors.
I think you need a concrete, real-world metaphor to talk about inner life without feeling like a jerk.
The National Rifle Association – all that we believe in and fight for – has become a metaphor for the core American liberty we all want preserved.
When you’re a black superhero, you can’t erase the notion that you’re black. If you’re black, living in the community, and you want to change things, there are going to be things that happen. That’s true of anybody. I mean, you could use celebrity as a similar metaphor.
Web media needs to move to TV metaphor – with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads.
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.
I liked my father’s work. But above all I liked the idea of doing something concrete and useful. Building a house is a metaphor that I like, it’s at the core of my life philosophy: starting from the bottom and reaching the top.
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.
There is this really tight relationship between horror and shame. And shame is in all of my books as the biggest monster. And horror is all about creating a metaphor for something you can’t face That connection is super powerful for me.
I love all my albums… I use the metaphor they’re like my children: some do better than others, but you love them all equally.
As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution: a ridding of excess or usurpers.
Contrary to the negative stereotype that folks who swear have poor vocabularies, a fluency in taboo language correlates with overall verbal fluency. The more words you know, the more you know… and the more colorfully you can express yourself, with nuance, metaphor, and emotion.
As a story writer, you have work with sharp but relatively small tools, the picks of metaphor, the shovel blade of images, the trowel of point of view, and then you delicately lift and brush in the revision with love and care knowing that one slip, and you might damage an extremely delicate thing.
I’m fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound: a sound that won’t dissipate over time. Essentially, the opposite of a piano, because the notes never fade. I suppose, in literary terms, it would be like a metaphor for eternity.
Bill Clinton sitting on Air Force One getting his hair cut while people around the country cooled their heels and waited for him, became a metaphor for a populist president who had gotten drunk with the perks of his own power and was sort of, you know, not sensitive to what people wanted.
Their scrambled attention spans struck me as a metaphor for the way we get our doses of reality these days.
‘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.
Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.
I am a consummate metaphor addict.
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.
It’s like dance is a metaphor for going beyond where you think you can go.
Quest stories are about the oldest form of narrative there is, and they’re also the perfect metaphor for life because we’re all on a journey trying to figure out where we’re going and who we are. ‘Solomon Creed’ is just doing it with more danger and guns involved.
The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.
I’m a little sad that they actually came up with the metaphor of waves for feminism. By definition, a wave goes in, and it comes out. I would really like it to be a tsunami that creates a flood that forever changes the landscape.
What life throws at you – you just have to learn how to hit it, which is a baseball metaphor. The ball’s outside, you hit to the right. You don’t let them go by.
