Selected metaphor quotes

1. Every man and every woman is a star.

2. My wind is turned to bitter north, That was so soft a south before; My sky, that shone so sunny bright, With foggy gloom is clouded o'er My gay green leaves are yellow-black, Upon the dank autumnal floor; For love, departed once, comes back No more again, no more.

3. As ships becalmed at eve, that lay With canvas drooping, side by side, Two towers of sail, at dawn of day Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried.

4. Giving birth is like taking your lower lip and forcing it over your head.

5. If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you'd form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

6. Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

7. Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea's speech.

8. It's our tendency to approach every problem as if it were a fight between two sides. We see it in headlines that are always using metaphors for war. It's a general atmosphere of animosity and contention that has taken over our public discourse.

9. If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

10. The blood will follow where the knife is driven, The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear.

11. One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

12. Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

13. Ah! American cigarettes are like the American soul - sweet and light.

14. Sports is human life in microcosm.

15. The tree looks like a dog, barking at heaven.

16. You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman.

17. You could have knocked me down with a fender.

18. I look like the wrath of grapes.

19. The coffee will be ready in a jitney.

20. The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

21. When things get too heavy, just call me helium, the lightest known gas to man.

22. Latins for Republicans - it's like roaches for Raid.

23. The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.

24. The Grateful Dead are faster than light drive.

25. So please don't think I have a 'down' on the MVS people. I'm just pulling off their arms to beat other people over the head with.

26. Elves are like trees, grounded and focused from the trunk down but graceful and agile on top.

27. Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

28. Some asked me where the rubies grew, And nothing I did say; But with my finger pointed to The lips of Julia.

29. The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

30. For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

31. Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.

32. And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.

33. In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons.

34. Sharks are the criminals of the sea. Dolphins are the outlaws.

35. The winter passed as slowly and peacefully as a boa constrictor digesting a valium addict.

36. The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.

37. Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.

38. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.

39. Look at The Rock's competition! Look at him! It looks like a big monkey came down here, took a crap, and out came Mankind!

40. Thank Heaven! the crisis - The danger is past, And the lingering illness Is over at last - And the fever called 'Living' Is conquered at last.

41. Heaven is blue, hell is red.

42. They found me in the gutter. The night was the only thing I had left and not much of it at that. I heard the car stop, the doors open and shut and two voices talking. A pair of arms jerked me to my feet and held me there. 'Drunk,' the cop said. The other one turned me around into the light. 'He don't smell bad. That cut on his head didn't come from a fall either.' 'Mugged?' 'Maybe.' I didn't give a damn which way they called it. They were both wrong anyhow. Two hours ago I was drunk. Not now. Two hours ago I was a roaring lion. Then the bottle sailed across the room. No lion left now. Now was a time when I wasn't anything. Nothing was left inside except the feeling a ship must have when it's torpedoed, sinks and hits bottom.

43. In this the Fire Book of the NiTo Ichi school of strategy I describe fighting as fire.

44. 'What is the color when black is burned?' - 'I Am a Child'

45. I am not the light, I am the night; but a flame stabs through my entrails and consumes me. I am the night devoured by light.

46. The question of whether a computer is playing chess, or doing long division, or translating Chinese, is like the question of whether robots can murder or airplanes can fly -- or people; after all, the 'flight' of the Olympic long jump champion is only an order of magnitude short of that of the chicken champion (so I'm told). These are questions of decision, not fact; decision as to whether to adopt a certain metaphoric extension of common usage.

47. If our Bodily Life is a burning, our Spiritual Life is a being burnt, a Combustion (or, is precisely the inverse the case?); Death, therefore, perhaps a Change of Capacity.

48. It's like a lightsaber, on fire.

49. How do we remember? Is the brain a jar that holds our memories? Then when we die, does the jar break? Are our memories spilled on the ground and lost? Or is the brain a map that leads down twisted paths and into hidden corners? Then when we die, the map is lost but perhaps some explorer could wander through that strange landscape and find out the hiding places of our misplaced memories.

50. Zebras are reactionaries, Antelopes are missionaries, Pigeons plot in secrecy, And hamsters turn on frequently.

51. Are ye, two vultures sick for battle, Two scorpions under one wet stone, Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle, Two crows perched on the murrained cattle, Two vipers tangled into one.

52. A mollusk is a cheap edition [of man] with a suppression of the costlier illustrations, designed for dingy circulation, for shelving in an oyster-bank or among the seaweed.

53. Here we'll strip and cool our fire In cream below, in milk-baths higher; And when all wells are drawn dry, I'll drink a tear out of thine eye.

54. John Barleycorn got up again, And sore surprised them all.

55. It has been said that great men are like eagles. They do not flock together. You find them one at a time, soaring alone, using their skill and their strengths to reach new heights and to seek new horizons. Such a man and such an eagle is Robert Byrd.

56. Some asked how pearls did grow, and where? Then spoke I to my girl To part her lips, and showed them there The quarelets of pearl.

57. He's basically Goro in a suit.

58. He is a small man in search of a balcony.

59. It was worse than taking poison.

60. 'by the bank of Kowthar (A stream in heaven), with lips parched by thirst, By the side of the Beloved (God) with heart afire by longing!'

61. Make a freight train take a dirt road.

62. My next shall be a more sober & chastised Epistle - but you see I was in the humour for metaphors - and to tell thee the Truth, I have so often serious reasons to quarrel with my Inclination, that I do not chuse to contradict it for Trifles.

63. 'If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali -- a collection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each may not mix with the next, but they combine on your palate to produce a satisfying repast.' [12]

64. Man found that he was faced with the acceptance of 'spiritual' forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be comprehended by the senses, particularly not by sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it was the movement of the air that provided the image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus, Hebrew: ruach = smoke). The idea of the soul was thus born as the spiritual principle in the individual ... Now the realm of spirits had opened for man, and he was ready to endow everything in nature with the soul he had discovered in himself.

65. Sex is the mathematical urge repressed.

66. Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the chocolate city... Mayor Nagin, I'd like to welcome you to Washington D.C., the chocolate city with a marshmallow center, and a graham cracker crust of corruption. It's a Mallomar I guess is what I'm describing.

67. Then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

68. We often think, naively, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress-just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures.

69. 'Well ... welcome. My house is your house', his brow suddenly furrowed and he looked worried, 'although only in a metaphorical sense, you understand, because I would not, much as I always admired your straightforward approach, and indeed your forthright stance, actually give you my house, it being the only house I have, and therefore the term is being extended in an, as it were, gratuitous fashion --'

70. Duly twice a morning Would I be sprinkling it with fountain-water. At last it grew, and grew, and bore, and bore, Till at the length It grew a gallows, and did bear our son, It bore thy fruit and mine: O wicked, wicked plant.

71. Beat all your feathers as flat down as pancakes.

72. 'If the U.S. was a person,' he later became fond of saying, 'and it sat down, Columbus, Ohio would instantly be plunged into darkness'

73. No, you don't wanna get me started. Jell-O with hair all in the mold. I'd be like, 'Damn, man, how are you gonna mess up Jell-O?' Jell-O is so wholesome and family-like. It just ruins it for me. To have a hair in there, yeah. I mean, I'm like, 'Come on, Bill Cosby pumps this, man!'

74. A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark. At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are...

75. So poisonous Are the ravishments of truth, so fatal to The truth itself, the first idea becomes The hermit in a poet's metaphors, Who comes and goes and comes and goes all day.

76. Hands, do what you're bid: Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.

77. What is pride? A whizzing rocket That would emulate a star.

78. There's Wyndham Lewis fuming out of sight, That lonely old volcano of the Right.

79. A buffalo in wolf's clothing.

80. 'His thoughts like a hundred moths, trapped in a lampshade.'

81. In my mind, he was guilty of no error he - was chargeable with no exaggeration - he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said that all we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve men into a box.

82. 'The bread of the stranger is bitter,' says Dante, 'and his staircase hard to climb.' But who can know what the bitterness of dependence is so well as the poor companion of an old lady of quality?

83. Dicko: The mountain was too high, the river too deep. Cabaret.

84. 'My wife's up there (on the roof) poking around like she knows what the fuck she's doing, I fired her ass off onto the fuckin car.' (from 'Roofing')

85. Life is a voyage. The winds of life come strong From every point; yet each will speed thy course along, If thou with steady hand when tempests blow Canst keep thy course aright and never once let go.

86. She behaves with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor

87. Polly wants a cracker Think I should get off her first, Think she wants some water To put out the blow torch.

88. Something in her eyes Must be the smoke in my lungs.

89. Kurt chewed bubblegum in his soul.

90. Cobain, can you hear the spheres Singing songs off station to station?

91. She behaves with all the sensitivity of a sex-starved boa constrictor

92. Interviewer: I read something somewhere about 'the monster'. Davey, I wanted you maybe to explain something about the monster that came out. I was just wondering if you could share that with our viewers. Davey: I don't know what the monster is. There is a monster. [Adam is giggling in the background] It happens in the studio, sometimes it happens on stage, [Adam can't control his giggling] and it's in my neck. Interviewer: It's in your neck. Show that. Davey: [points] Right about here. Sometimes it happens when I'm just talking, like I'd be talking to you and the monster bites me. Interviewer: Alright. Davey: It hurts. Adam: He could just be standing there and all of a sudden just DROP ['dropping' arm motion] and be on the floor. Davey: Because of the monster. Interviewer: Man. Due to the monster? Jade: People probably think we're a weird band because of this. People listening to this are probably thinking we're just weird. Davey: Yeah I mean, this is not an attempt to be whack.

93. We're not a family. We're the opposite of a family. We're people so lonely that when we're together we make a black hole of loneliness and everything else gets sucked down into it and is never seen again

94. The river was pure treachery, so smooth on top, the water so cool on a hot day, and yet there was death in it, murder in it's heart. Like the Egyptians. Such a darling child, they would say, and pat her head. And Miriam would answer in her heart : you made my father a slave. You want us all dead. You are the river, you and all of Egypt. You are the river and as long as we stay beside you we are in danger of drowning

95. '...like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car' --Unknown critic when commenting on his voice

96. '...like a clown crossed with a cherry bomb.' --Anonymous young girl, liner notes to Used Songs: 1973-1980

97. In my chest I feel pain comin sudden storms/Life full of rain in this game watch for landstorms

98. An old town clerk looking at European affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe

99. There were many seas. The sea roared like a tiger. The sea whispered in your ear like a friend telling you secrets. The sea clinked like small change in a pocket. The sea thundered like avalanches. The sea hissed like sandpaper working on wood. The sea sounded like someone vomiting. The sea was dead silent. p. 215

100. Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.