But it was like a dance across a field strewn with razors, and I bled with every step I took.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who’d just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done, cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction....

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that...

Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game,...

It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much...

…a tall, gaunt man with small narrow eyes set deep in his skull like two old sisters trying to spy out of the windows of their house without being noticed themselves.

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.

Hatred is as easy as slipping on a well-worn woolen cloak. If only it provided the comfort of one.

Metaphor, everything is sort of Metaphor of something else.

…I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the...

Being what we are, rational but also animate, amphibians who start from the world of sense and proceed through myth and metaphor to the world of spirit. I do not see how we could have...

Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. -Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.

Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon,...

But that’s life right? It’s just a shitty hand of cards. But then maybe somebody pulls out an Ace, and somebody else gets a four, or a ten. It’s all in the draw and how...

People say that eyes are windows to the soul.

I’m trying to keep you safe.” Safe as a porcelain bowl wrapped in cotton linen and boxed up. It would be a lie to say she didn’t want to feel safe, or that Nolan’s worry...

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes true it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s...

… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having...

Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to...

If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

There ́s a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly...

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

His smile was so wide he’d have had to break it into sections to fit it through a doorway

If funkytown was a trailerpark, this guy would be a double-wide.

There comes a time in a man’s life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare...

Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.

The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.It is the night...

Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.

On entendait alors les véhicules cahoter encore dans la nuit d’été, avec leur chargement de fleurs et de morts.

unless you’re the lead dog the view never changes…mercy out does justice every time:always find your way back home/

What’s this?” he inquired, none too pleasantly. “A circus?””No, Julius. It’s the end of the circus.””I see. And these are the clowns?”Foaly’s head poked through the doorway.”Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but...

…[P]hilosophical theories are structured by conceptual metaphors that constrain which inferences can be drawn within that philosophical theory. The (typically unconscious) conceptual metaphors that are constitutive of a philosophical theory have the causal effect of...

Porque las metáforas […] son nuestra forma de leer el cuerpo, de interpretar todo lo extraño en nuestra fisiología.

And feast on the dead, I thought with a shudder. As if he could read my thoughts, he pressed a hand to my shoulder. His fingers were long and white, splaying over my arm like...

No. That’s us,” she says with certainty.

Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have...

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a...

Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed–linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except...

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the...

A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.

Beth’s not on that train?””Nope. She’s not even in that station, that town, or that part of whatever country your metaphor lives in.