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...

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.