Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and...

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as...

and all anyone’ll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.

Yes, I can speak to this one. He can be my rider.

Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a...

When birds look into houses, what impossible worlds they see.

As history shows, dead metaphors make good idols.

I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or...

The statue of Justice, symbol of the law, as she holds aloft her balance scale, is blindfolded. Justice is blind to race, creed, color – and to personal eccentricity. If there were a comparable state...

As the new Adam, it might be said, his final act was to cast the Apple of Knowledge into the deep blue sea.

Once a flower is picked it immediately begins to die.

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. ‘It is the Æolian harp of style,’ thought Julien. ‘Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save...

It was a smooth silvery voice that matched her hair. It had a tiny tinkle in it, like bells in a doll’s house. I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it.

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!This kindness...

[Francesca] ‘You really are a few biscuits short of breakfast.’His eyebrows furrowed in confusion.’You’re a few colors shy of a rainbow?’ she offered. ‘Not pulling a full wagon? Knitting with only one needle? All foam...

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

Anne tried to bite her tongue, but she was finding her mouth bloody too often.

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract...

it’s colder than a witch’s tit in a steel bra

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar

She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong.

Where glowing embers through the roomTeach light to counterfeit a gloom…

Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating...

Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.

It’s a commonly expressed and rather nice, romantic notion that we are all “sisters” and “brothers.”Let’s be real. Fact is, we might be better served to accept that we are all siblings.Siblings fight, pull each...

Not all beaches are fun and sunscreen.

Holly steps back. Being warned about a ghost and seeing him are not the same. ‘What did they do to you?’Some of the Anchorites laugh. Hugo looks back at his long-ago lover. ‘They’-he looks about...

If a tree is bent, every goat will jump on it.

Invisible prose only!” rules out the sparkling style of [writers]. . . For [whom] vivid prose, and the visionary mind it evinces, rich with speculation, insight, and subjectivity, is the craft and offers a unique...

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

I’ve simplified much more in my writing. I say what I’ve got to say, not in metaphor.

The whiskey kicked like a mugger.

Achilles might be a good papa to the family, but he was also a killer, and he never forgives.Poke knew that, though. Bean warned her, and she knew it, but she chose Achilles for their...

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.All are continually asking, “What does this represent? What does it stand for?”They are trying to take everything one level deeper. When...

If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it’s making up metaphors. They just appear. I can’t move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make...

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer...

I don’t know. I only know that there are those whose minds I can speak with that, when I show them how, speak back to my mind as well.

…I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down...

One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror...

You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you

Did you ever get the feeling that everything was too perfect? Like the moment was so good that something had to be wrong? Kind of like the way a fish sees that bright, shiny lure...

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices. And then, while he ate them, she would talk...

las petites morts”: because the things that bring us passion tend to slip past our defenses, to creep insidiously into every facet of our consciousnesses and kill us as ruthlessly, and efficiently, as any drug.

After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which...

It’s like practicing pole vaulting your entire life, and then getting to the olympics and saying, ‘what the hell did I want to jump over this stupid bar for?

But what he didn’t understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm’s length or farther away. I understood those mermaids.I didn’t care if they sang to me.All I wanted was...