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.

The ChairI’m writing to you, who made the archaic wooden chairlook like a throne while you sat on it.Amidst your absence, I choose to sit on the floor,which is dusty as a dry Kansas day.I...

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;Though, Syren-like...

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging “Say it new! Say it new!” It’s hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to...

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical...

Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world’s better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.

Love is like a pane of glass.. It can take harsh beatings from the weather around it… But if it gets hit in the right place it shatters.. And when you try to pick it...

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

I am not plain, or average or – God forbid – vanilla. I am peanut butter rocky road with multicolored sprinkles, hot fudge and a cherry on top.

A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.

As Roran watched, the man’s arms, neck, and chest shriveled, and his bones appeared in sharp relief-from the bowlike curve of his collarbones to the hollow saddle of his hips, where his stomach hung like...

Wrong, and wrong agains,’ he said. ‘The likeness is already there. The metaphor only sees it. And it is not a mere figure of speech. It is the very essence of our minds as we...

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.