Metaphor is a slippery eel, if it wasn’t for its shock I’d stick to the easy catch of prose.

A poem without metaphor is a gelding; useless to nightmares.

Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.

In times like these I always cheered myself up with a certain story. I forgot just when I first heard it, or who I heard it from… but, back when I was young it would...

The world is a room of heavy furniture. Eventually you are allowed to leave.

Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.

If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.

In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged...

Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.

It was like the panting of a thousand puppies.

Determination is learning to form a habit, and never breaking it in future.

i do not give a sh*t, the toilet miss me now

Comparisons are like rigid fingers—eager to point at a subject but unwilling to grasp it.

I feel all agitated, like one of those snow globes you see resting peacefully on shop counters. I was perfectly happy being an ordinary, dull little Swiss village. But now Jack Harper’s come and shaken...

When the devout religion of mine eyeMaintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,And these, who, often drowned, could never die,Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars!One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sunNe’er saw her...

At last he was to feel that he had the town, as it were, in his pocket, and was ready for anything. Accordingly he sent a confidential messenger to Rome, to ask his father what...

In the time we spend reeling in confusion, grasping at straws trying to piece our egos together, we forget to acknowledge some things. Society created gender roles and categorizations and lifestyles and names and titles...

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God requires metaphor not only to be imagined but to be approached, exhorted, evaded, confronted, struggled with, and loved. Through metaphor, the vividness, intensity,...

The sense of tragedy – according to Aristotle – comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into...

that beauty can come from violence, if only in metaphor.

The bad parts of the statute are not judicially severable, I consider, from the rest of its provisions that deal with imprisonment. Their roots are entangled too tenaciously in the surrounding soil for a clean...

Smoke and mirrors’ is a useful metaphor for the ways in which organised abuse has chided conceptualisation and understanding. The chapter provides an overview of cite often incendiary debates over organised abuse before going on...

She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to feel more, in the...

Grandmother was like an opal. You could never be sure which colors were really there and which were just tricks of the light.

By now, we’re all familiar with the literary post-apocalyptic world’s metaphors. The zombies are our anxieties. The vampires are our greed. Our fairies are hope. Our werewolves are … what again? Something

(aside) Oh, you are well tuned now,But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music,As honest as I am.

…The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mintHad bundled itself in a stole of gray lint.

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn’t like they didn’t understand each other. They understood each other better than...

At first, when a child meets something that scares him, the fear grows, like a wave. But when he goes into the water and swims – gets used to the water – the wave grows...

To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself...

It’s not always so easy,” she said softly.”Why not? It’s a part of who you are, isn’t it?” he asked with all the sympathy of an asp being prodded with a stick.

She had a voice so husky it could have pulled a dogsled, and the gun she was holding gave me a bad case of barrel envy.

Let them enjoy their Eden while they can; though there’s plenty of apples, I fear, on the tree yet, Mr Lawford.

It was a high ceilinged room with tall, large-panes windows. Apart from the doorway was the desk where book had been checked out in days when books were still being checked out. He stood there...

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the...

…I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the...

Life’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

Alarm stole over me on little kitten feet.

They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.

It is like the panting of a thousand puppies.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other…they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are...

wen thectaste of my own medicine is given to me results into silent treatment,its not bitter therefore i enjoy the medicine i gave you too.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

No more light answers. Let our officersHave note what we purpose. I shall breakThe cause of our expedience to the QueenAnd get her leave to part. For not aloneThe death of Fulvia, with more urgent...