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.