They call it the drowning instinct. It’s when drowning doesn’t look like drowning. (pg. 241)

Speech is the pen and the sword of humankind and it is the foundation of their kingdom. Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies are. defeated and scattered. In the arenas in...

The man’s emotions flowed back and forth like waves of the sea.

Every human is a school subject. This is rather a metaphorical way of saying it, to put it straight, those you love are few, and the ones you detest are many.

The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Time is a river…and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time...

There’s a great spirit gone! Thus did I desire it.What our contempts doth often hurl from us,We wish it ours again. The present pleasure,By revolution lowering, does becomeThe opposite of itself. She’s good, being gone.The...

The nature of atheism merits clarification on two further points which involve less common ideas about theism. The first involves the idea of ‘God’ which is metaphorical — for example, a theist who believes in...

Together a brick and a blanket create the perfect metaphor for life. Will you be a brick and make something of your life, or be a blanket and sleep your life away?

I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.

…there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role...

I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I’m seeing we don’t live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to...

Islands are metaphors of the heart, no matter what poet says otherwise.

She remembered how it had felt and tasted, that slowly descending depression, like a thick glass jar that closed around you, sucking away the air you needed to breathe, creating a barrier between you and...

But how can you be there for someone who doesn’t need you? It’s like trying to scale a wall without anyone on the top throwing you a rope. You just keep sliding down and eventually...

I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more.

My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it.

Don’t stop. Don’t disillusion me.”Snows melt. The mountain silvers into many a stream.The oranges are golden worlds in a dark dream.

And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African...

There’s always hope. And oceans. Hope and oceans.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things—like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me...

We, Brandy and Alfa and me, we’ve been speaking English as a second language so long that we’ve forgotten it as our first.I have no native tongue.

The HBS logo shone high above, a surrogate sun for the overcast day.

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

Birds shouldn’t be able to find tearsThey are the definition of freedom

Delia was an overbearing cake with condescending frosting, and frankly, I was on a diet.

For the people of my country,” Renato said, “water is everything: love, life, religion… even God.””It is like that for me too,” I said. “In English we call that a metaphor.””Of course,” said Renato, “and...

The earth is buzzing with metaphor

Nowadays films and television are what I like to call “Microwave Media”. I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes...

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic...

They say the eyes are the window to the soul.

Trees lose their leaves in blizzards like these.

When the sun touched the earth, it spread out along the horizon like a giant yolk oozing free of its skin.

I had to hand it to him, leaving the empty glove lying on the bed was an apt metaphor for love. Two things I can say about my grandpa are that he is wise, and...

It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow–such...

If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.”-Vergere

Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.

One recalls the literary writer who, after grasping a story of a Mars voyage as a metaphor for isolation and the precariousness of relationships, realized that at a deeper, more subtle level it might even...

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

She’s all over us like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with one pickpocket yesterday.

Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows....

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it...

I was running and deliberately lost my way. The world far off and nothing but my breath and the very next step and it’s like hypnosis. The feeling of conquering my own aliveness with no...

In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical...

Translation error is compounded by bias error. We distort others by forcing into them our preferred ideas and gestalts, a process Proust beautifully describes: We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with...

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact...

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them?