Horror is my favorite genre, but it works best for me when it’s a metaphor on top of something we can all relate to.
I feel as much of a stud as… I can’t come up with a metaphor. That’s how lacking in studliness I am.
I think our path to the Olympics is a good metaphor for how you build a company. Our skill and commitment grew over time, day by day, stroke by stroke. So, sports are tied well with our entrepreneurial pursuits because you train for a few years, but there is no guarantee that you will succeed.
In Judaism, the temple was the most holy site in the world. But if you extend that argument as a metaphor, and you say ‘The world is a holy place,’ and you’re treating this holy place like a money-lending psycho, then Jesus says, ‘This is hypocrisy!’ and he’d point it out and flip it over.
Sports is a terrific metaphor that’s hardly been touched on TV.
You can’t completely control the sport – Tiger Woods comes close. The test is against yourself and nature’s own way. I find golf a particularly good metaphor for this story.
New York is actually a pretty safe place, and I think invoking the Bronx as a metaphor for the nightmarish urban environment is no longer spot on.
In the 1960s, reaching for the moon meant just that. It was a metaphor for attempting the impossible, and we attempted it, and we did it. And it inspired millions of people in every way. The number of science graduates in this country doubled in the 1960s at every level – high school, college, Ph.D.
The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: ‘The poem’s sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.’
New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party – usually at a gathering in a home – where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life.
Back in the 1980s, state-of-the-nation fictions were all set in Manhattan. Now, they’re all in Trump country. Early in ‘S-Town,’ we’re introduced to an actual maze, every branch of which leads to a further junction. This may also be a metaphor.
I’ve always loved color because it’s a little bit like music. I love that it seems to be both physical and ephemeral and engages us as a metaphor for our feeling lives.
Flower was a good metaphor for growth. The song is obviously about sexual responsibility, so that was the main metaphor. Also, it’s like knowing who someone has been and remembering and appreciating that, but really appreciating what they are now even more.
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.
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.
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.
Metaphor is embodied in language.
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.
What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you’ve seen or thought about.
It’s a wonderful metaphor, catching a wave, for how you can look at other challenges in your life.
People think genes are an absolute cause of traits. But the notion that the genome is the blueprint for humanity is a very bad metaphor. If you think we’re hard-wired and deterministic, there should indeed be a lot more genes.
Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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.
We often attribute ‘understanding’ and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.
I do think – the metaphor I always use – it’s the role of intelligence community to stay down in the engine room and shovel that intelligence coal, and people on the bridge get to decide where to drive the ship and how fast and how to arrange all the deckchairs.
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
‘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.
The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality, it then becomes dense and masks the truth it is meant to display.
I remember when I started writing lyrics, I was very grand. I tried to use a lot of symbols,because I thought that’s how songwriting should be – with imagery and metaphor. I figured, after a while, maybe I should just write it as I would say in real life.
I resist and resent the idea of California as a metaphor. It’s something thrust upon us, usually by people in the East.
The metaphor of the subterranean is at work in a lot of Northwest writers and artists. Zooming in closer and closer and closer, then below, to the worms and the centipede.
When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It’s understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor. In some places, you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive.
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.
Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it’s them I’m designing for.
I realized that food was actually a metaphor for bringing us all together. It’s about us communicating and being like family.
