Love Metaphor Quotes & Sayings

So you think that most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they're feeling is real.'
'Real isn't relevant,' Georgie said, turning completely to face Heather. 'It's like ... you're tossing a ball between you, and you're just hoping you can keep it in the air. And it has nothing to do with whether you love each other or not. If you didn't love each other, you wouldn't be playing this stupid game with the ball. You love each other
and you just hope you can keep the ball in play.'
'What's the ball a metaphor for?'
'I'm not sure,' Georgie said. 'The relationship. Marriage. — Rainbow Rowell

Breastfeeding is an unsentimental metaphor for how love works, in a way. You don't decide how much and how deeply to love - you respond to the beloved, and give with joy exactly as much as they want. — Marni Jackson

(W.D.) Howells asserted that the Americans' 'love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry.' Their fiction, he added, often gathers in the gray 'twilight of the reason,' on 'the borderland between experience and illusion. Howells's geographical metaphor was derived, of course, from Hawthorne's idea of a moonlit 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Whether literally, as in Cooper's The Spy, or metaphorically, as in Hawthorne's works, the neutral territory/borderland was the familiar setting of the American romance. As American writers came to realize, not only was there a borderland between East and West, civilization and wilderness, but also between the here and the hereafter, between conscious and unconscious, 'experience and illusion' - psychic frontiers on the edge of territories both enticing and terrifying. — Howard Kerr

They fell to, on the ground. You've seen a baker
rolling dough. He kneads it gently at first,
then more roughly. He pounds it on the board.
It softly groans under his palms.

Now he spreads
it out and rolls it flat. Then he bunches it,
and rolls it all the way out again,

thin.
Now he adds water and mixes it well.

Now salt,
and a little more salt. Now he shapes itdelicately to its final shape and slides itinto the oven, which is already hot.
You remember breadmaking!

This is how your desire
tangles with a desired one.

And it's not justa metaphor for a man and a woman making love.
Warriors in battle do this too.

A great mutual embrace
is always happening between the eternal
and what dies, between essence and accident. — Jalaluddin Rumi

I watched as Humphrey Bogart's character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman's character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn't. I didn't care. I had enough problems of my own. — Graeme Simsion

Some burns," Clary said. "Nothing that matters"
"Everything that happens to you matters to me."
"Well that certainly explains why you haven't called me back once. And the last time I saw you, you ran away without telling me why. It's like dating a ghost."
Jace's mouth quirked up slightly at the side. "Not exactly. Isabelle actually dated a ghost. She could tell you
"
"No," Clary said. "It was a metaphor. And you know exactly what I mean. — Cassandra Clare

It reveals how well you value someone - the way you handle their belongings. — Joyce Rachelle

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. — Michael Bassey Johnson

No more light answers. Let our officers
Have note what we purpose. I shall break
The cause of our expedience to the Queen
And get her leave to part. For not alone
The death of Fulvia, with more urgent touches,
Do strongly speak to us, but the letters too
Of many our contriving friends in Rome
Petition us at home. Sextus Pompeius
Hath given the dare to Caesar and commands
The empire of the sea. Our slippery people,
Whose love is never linked to the deserver
Till his deserts are past, begin to throw
Pompey the Great and all his dignities
Upon his son, who - high in name and power,
Higher than both in blood and life - stands up
For the main soldier; whose quality, going on,
The sides o' th' world may danger. Much is breeding
Which, like the courser's hair, hath yet but life
And not a serpent's poison. — William Shakespeare

I hate seeing poetry in everything I touch. I hate that I can no longer love you without turning you into a metaphor - that it can never be simple as looking at you and saying yes, yes, yes. — Shinji Moon

The myth of redemptive violence is, in short, nationalism become absolute. This myth speaks for God; it does not listen for God to speak. It invokes the sovereignty of God as its own; it does not entertain the prophetic possibility of radical judgment by God. It misappropriates the language, symbols, and scriptures of Christianity. It does not seek God in order to change; it embraces God in order to prevent change. Its God is not the impartial ruler of all nations but a tribal god worshiped as an idol. Its metaphor is not the journey but the fortress. Its symbol is not the cross but the crosshairs of a gun. Its offer is not forgiveness but victory. Its good news is not the unconditional love of enemies but their final elimination. Its salvation is not a new heart but a successful foreign policy. Its usurps the revelation of God's purposes for humanity in Jesus. It is blasphemous. It is idolatrous. — Walter Wink

Now, before I extend this metaphor, let me make a distinction between career and creativity. Creativity is connected to your passion, that light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. That small voice that tells you, "I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going." That is the juicy stuff that lubricates our lives and helps us feel less alone in the world. Your creativity is not a bad boyfriend. It is a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug. If you are even a little bit nice to her she will make you feel great and maybe cook you delicious food. — Amy Poehler

My faith teaches me that the path to join souls in love must of necessity involve a crucifixion, and I think there's a metaphor in there for marriage. — Donald Miller

A flower doesn't expect love. She is happy with herself. If she gets love, she celebrates. — Debasish Mridha

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken. — Marion Woodman

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come. — Matt Groening

It is no strain of metaphor to say that the love of God and the wrath of God are the same thing, described from opposite points of view. How we shall experience it depends upon the way we shall come up against it: God does not change; it is man's moral state that changes. The wrath of God is a figure of speech to denote God's unchanging opposition to sin; it is His righteous love operating to destroy evil. It is not evil that will have the last word, but good; not sorrow, but joy; not hate, but love. — Reginald John Campbell

Marathoning is a metaphor for life, so there are a lot of parallels you can draw. I tell people to follow your dream, follow your heart, follow your passion, run your own race and believe in yourself. I think anybody who wants to succeed has to have passion. My love for this sport, you can't instill it in someone else. — Joan Benoit

Life is a piece of art drawn by love on the canvas of hope with the colors of desires, wants, and needs. — Debasish Mridha

Our central problem is not sin and guilt, as it is within the monarchical model. For the Spirit model, our central problem is "estrangement," whose specific meaning of "separated from that to which one belongs" is most appropriate ... For the monarchical model, sin is primarily disloyalty to the king, seen especially as disobedience to his laws. The metaphors used to express the Spirit model suggest something else. For the metaphor of God as lover, sin is unfaithfulness - that is, sin is going after other lovers. — Marcus J. Borg

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm. — Juliet Marillier

His love for me seemed to overflow my limits by its flood of wealth and service. But my necessity was more for giving than foe receiving; for love is a vagabond, who can make his flowers bloom in the wayside dust, better than in the crystal jars kept in the drawing-room. — Rabindranath Tagore

The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing. — Shahriar Mandanipour

For him I was like the land, something to care for...well, he loved to make things grow. But he resembled the land more than me. He needed constant cultivation, or the fruit turned wild. — Bruce-Novoa

Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me ... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal. — Werner Herzog

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) — Ani DiFranco

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 to their souls. — Geoffrey Wood

Their conversations were often charged with an excitement out of proportion to what they talked about... Their words seemed to glimmer in the air between them, dangerous metallic threads that quickly connected both of them to books and ideas, to language itself. The jailer told Teza about the daring subject matter of the famous writer Ju's recent novel, in which a passionate young man falls in love with an older woman, but the story, as he was telling it, became a metaphor for their own deepening and forbidden association....Teza refused to act like a prisoner, which freed Chit Naing from acting like a jailer. — Karen Connelly

That cloak of love you were wearing - he's torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds? — Antonia Michaelis

I love metaphors. I've never been on this train ... If I'm standing on the middle of a track, I'm definitely going to get derailed. I have to make sure that I'm on the train and not in front of it. — Serena Williams

No! he wanted to cry out. No, Tania, please come back. What can I leave her with, what can I say, what one word can I leave with her, for her? What one word for my wife?
"Tatiasha," Alexander called after her. God, what was the curator's name ... ?
She glanced back.
"Remember Orbeli- — Paullina Simons

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work. — Vivian Gornick

Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. — Martin Buber

I sat on the bench outside of class today and talked to Jon. I read to him from my journal, it was the part about the accordian player I was watching on the street last weekend. He said that an accordian is such a perfect metaphor for Love, because you are always opening, and closing, shifting, and getting air, and that's how the music happens. True. — Sabrina Ward Harrison

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 up ... You end up getting cut. — Tyler Hoyt

The absence of the Beloved is Hell, is imprisonment. And that absence fuels love until the prisoner becomes a conflagration of yearning. Sometimes the absent beloved is a woman, sometimes it is democracy, sometimes it is the dreams of youth. But always, always, separation is just a catapult to a new level of love. Each time he was imprisoned, each time he and my mother were forced apart, he would write to her - half-teasing, half-tender - of his immersion in that metaphor. In part because he believed it; in part because he would do everything he could to keep her from pain. — Kamila Shamsie

His studies were always second to Beatrice. He would've said everything was second to Beatrice but the flowery metaphors and literary devices can only stretch so far and for so many characters. — Bruce Crown

I'm oxygen and he's dying to breathe. — Tahereh Mafi

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 lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist. — David Levithan

I would like to use this little flower as a metaphor. The five petals of the little forget-me-not flower prompt me to consider five things we would be wise never to forget ... first, forget not to be patient with yourself ... second, forget not the difference between a good sacrifice and a foolish sacrifice ... third, forget not to be happy now ... fourth, forget not the why of the gospel ... fifth, forget not that the Lord loves you. — Dieter F. Uchtdorf

A great artist paints a picture on the canvas of his mind using the colors of his love and imagination before transferring the image onto a real canvas. — Debasish Mridha

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. — Salman Rushdie

If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. "Actually - maybe I am that kind of person after all. "Love, Harold. — Hanya Yanagihara

In the front yard lives the oldest thing around, a white oak
That I used to say is my love for the world,
That I now would just call love as it is.
Belonging to nobody, no metaphor, the very. — Coleman Barks

If you threw a brick at someone you would be responsible for them feeling pain, presumably,' Libby said. 'But if you do the right thing and it makes someone feel bad, isn't that their problem? Then again, how do you even know what the right thing is? Who decides?' 'It's so confusing. I am sure about Mark, but I was sure about Bob before that, and Richard before that. Maybe Mark isn't for ever, I just think he is now when I can't have him. I have to face up to this about myself. I fall in love like that.' She clicked her fingers. 'I always have. For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it's like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else. Good metaphor, huh? — Scarlett Thomas

. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence. — Saul Bellow

There is nothing more powerful, more radical, more transformational than love. No other substance or force. And do not be deceived, for it is all of these things, and then far more than that. It can't be circumscribed by our desires or dictated by the whim of our moods. Not the Great Love of the Universe, as I like to call it. Not the Love that set everything in motion, keeps it in motion, which moves through all things and yet bulldozes nothing, not even our will. Try it. Just try it and you'll see. If you love that Great Love first, because It loved you first, and then love yourself as you have been loved, and love others from that love ... WOW! BAM! Life without that kind of faith-that's death. Therein lies the great metaphor ... Life without faith IS death. For life, as it was intended to be, is love. Start loving and you'll really start living. There is no other force in the universe comparable to that. — Carolyn Weber

I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life. — John Scalzi

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?'
I shook my head. 'No, but I've watched. I know what you mean.' The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
The seat of human emotion should be the liver,' Doc Homer said. 'That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.'
I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left. — Barbara Kingsolver

The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth were but ready they would not need even to bite, the bones would crack themselves and the marrow would be freely accessible to the feeblest of dogs. If I remain faithful to this metaphor, then the goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears monstrous, it is true. For I want to compel all dogs thus to assemble together, I want the bones to crack open under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life they love, while all by myself, quite alone, I lap up the marrow. That sounds monstrous, almost as if I wanted to feed on the marrow, not merely of bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a metaphor. The marrow that I am discussing here is no food; on the contrary, it is a poison. — Franz Kafka

A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief. — Kelly Link

But it has finally hit me: she is neither a concept nor a symbol nor a metaphor. She actually exists: she has warm flesh and a spirit that moves. I never should have lost sight of that warmth and that movement. — Haruki Murakami

The moon is too old, the flower is too old;even the sunset is not enough. The only relevant metaphor for you is your mirror image. — Amit Kalantri

The picaresque path can probably also be a metaphor for the passage of the soul back to its creator. The thieves along the way
the thieves of money, of love, of magic, of time
are merely human obstacles to keep the traveller from perceiving that she herself is the path.
The path is as steep and as precipitous as we make it, as level and rolling as we can grade it, as steady as we are steady, as passable or impassable as our own will to pass.
In a true picaresque, the hero stops struggling and becomes the path.
At fifty, we need this knowledge most of all. — Erica Jong

People think of hearts when they think of love, but a heart is a bloody organ in the body. It doesn't have any emotions. It's like a metaphor for love that has nothing to do with what love actually is. — E. Lockhart

Oh, you mean like Orpheo rescuing Euniphon from the Underworld?" said Roland.
Rob Anybody just stared.
"It's a myth from Ephebe," Roland went on. "It's supposed to be a love story, but it's really a metaphor for the annual return of summer. There's a lot of versions of that story."
( ... )
"A metaphor is a kind o' lie to help people understand what's true," said Billy Bigchin, but this didn't help much. — Terry Pratchett

They then interviewed us, asking about our love of Qingdao, how we met, why we came. Having learned quickly what they wanted to hear, we answered with the obligatory enthusiasm. Patrick, in especially fine form, waxed the kind of cheesy poetic that put yen-signs in the eyes of the producers. On a seaside boardwalk, for example, they asked him a simple question about the appeal of Qingdao to which he replied with a philosophical metaphor on what he lovingly dubbed, "The Qingdao Mist," a euphemism for the constant polluted haze that enveloped the city. He compared it to the dreamlike state of early love, when all landscapes are a pleasant blur of fuzzy details. I, trying not to laugh, vented my amusement in a wide, photographic smile. — Megan Rich

There s a metaphor which I love: living like a drawing compass. As you know, one leg of the compass is static, rooted in a place. Meanwhile, the other leg draws a wide circle, constantly moving. Like that, my fiction as well. One part of it is rooted in Istanbul with strong Turkish roots. But the other part travels the world, connecting to different cultures. — Elif Shafak

I feel all agitated, like one of those snow globes you see resting peacefully on shop counters. I was perfectly happy being an ordinary, dull little Swiss village. But now Jack Harper's come and shaken me up, and there are snowflakes all over the place, whirling around until I don't know what I think anymore. And bits of glitter, too. Tiny bits of shiny, secret excitement. — Sophie Kinsella

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. — Milan Kundera

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

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. — Milan Kundera

All war is based in deception (cfr. Sun Tzu, "The Art of War").
Definition of deception: "The practice of deliberately making somebody believe things that are not true. An act, a trick or device entended to deceive somebody".
Thus, all war is based in metaphor.
All war necessarily perfects itself in poetry.
Poetry (since indefinable) is the sense of seduction.
Therefore, all war is the storytelling of seduction, and seduction is the nature of war. — Pola Oloixarac

If I love freedom above all else, then any commitment becomes a metaphor, a symbol. This touches on the difference between the forest fleer and the partisan:this distinction is not qualitative but essential in nature. The anarch is closer to Being. The partisan moves within the social or national party structure, the anarch is outside of it. Of course, the anarch cannot elude the party structure, since he lives in society. — Ernst Junger

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages. — Jesmyn Ward

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. — William H. Macy

The ultimate Mystery of being, the ultimate Truth, is Love. This is the essential structure of reality. When Dante spoke of the 'love which moves the sun and the other stars', he was not using a metaphor, but was describing the nature of reality. There is in Being an infinite desire to give itself in love and this gift of Self in love is for ever answered by a return of love ... and so the rhythm of the universe is created. — Venerable Bede

Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves. — Vivian Gornick

love was never meant to be
just a metaphor
between the pages of poetry. — Sanober Khan

She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition. — Janet Flanner

Love ... doesn't need a complicated metaphor And sometimes nothing needs to be said at all — Immortal Technique

I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness. — Michael Grant

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. — John Updike

When I was developing the [Daredevil] idea, we were really doing something closer to what was in the comic book. By that, I mean in terms of civilians in the street knew that superpowers were an everyday matter of fact. When it finally ended up at Netflix, they really decided to land it in the Marvel Universe that exists in the cinematic universe. That changes the story entirely. It was no longer about the other, which is what that metaphor was. It's really more about the character herself, which I love. — Melissa Rosenberg

If we lived close to nature in an agricultural society, the seasons as metaphor and fact would continually frame our lives. But the master metaphor of our era does not come from agriculture - it comes from manufacturing. We do not believe that we 'grow' our lives - we believe that we 'make' them. Just listen to how we use the word in everyday speech: we make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love. — Parker J. Palmer

I'm just fascinated by houses. In another life, I'd have probably trained as an architect. If I had enough money, I'd collect them like other people collect teapots. I don't know why I love them so much. I'm just very interested in the idea of a house as a metaphor for the way one lives. — Frances Mayes

We Americans love to cite the 'political spectrum' as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. — Rick Perlstein

When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good. — Robert Dessaix

His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer. — Michael Chabon

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance. — Milan Kundera

I love sports. Anytime I can combine sports with a film I'm a happy guy. It's such a natural fit, because sports always seems to be a metaphor for life. Always, always, always. — Dean Cain

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat. — Jandy Nelson

Stretched and skewed
Tap of the 8-ball and the cue
Scratches fall through
They are the scars of you — Criss Jami

I loved Catwoman's sense of humor. I love how sly she is. I love how she, to use a cat metaphor, walks the fence and you don't know which side she's going to come down on. She's totally independent. And let's face it, she's badass. — Anne Hathaway

I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She was all the raw colours of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple in man's form. — Pierce Brown

The rhythm of the heart...beats twice. Thump, thump. Once, first for itself and then once again for the rest of the body. It's a true metaphor for us. Like the heart we must pump life giving love and care for ourselves first, before extending that gift out to others. The heartbeat of every worthwhile relationship begins with a healthy, humble understanding and appreciation of our own personal self worth. When we do this the power to truly love and appreciate others pulsates fluidly and freely into all those we warmly choose to share our lives with. — Jason Versey

Has anyone ever been more lovesick than a zombie, that pale, dull metaphor for love, all animal craving and lurching, outstretched arms, his very existence a sonnet about how much he wants those brains? — Jess Walter

For instance, to be fluent with the various LOVE IS A JOURNEY expressions, one has to fathom the conceptual metaphor in considerable depth. Lakoff explains:
The lovers are travelers on a journey together, with their common life goals seen as destinations to be reached. The relationship is their vehicle, and it allows them to pursue those common goals together. The relationship is seen as fulfilling its purpose as long as it allows them to make progress toward their common goals. The journey isn't easy. There are impediments, and there are places (crossroads) where a decision has to be made about which direction to go in and whether to keep traveling together. — Steven Pinker

Creativity itself doesn't care at all about results - the only thing it craves is the process. Learn to love the process and let whatever happens next happen, without fussing too much about it. Work like a monk, or a mule, or some other representative metaphor for diligence. Love the work. Destiny will do what it wants with you, regardless. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren't hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation. Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it. — Leslie Jamison

The fact was, as a story - even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean - the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning. I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we're in. The — Andrew Klavan

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation. — Patrick O'Neil

An oracle must cross the moat of logic and reach the inner poet that resides, perhaps repressed but nonetheless alive, within all of us. The I Ching helps us tune into our feeling consciousness through imagery and metaphor, and this, we find, is the path of clarity, of both strength and tolerance, of gentle humor, and of love. — Carol K. Anthony

Through humility, soul searching, and prayerful contemplation we have gained a new understanding of certain dogmas. The church no longer believes in a literal hell where people suffer. This doctrine is incompatible with the infinite love of God. God is not a judge but a friend and a lover of humanity. God seeks not to condemn but only to embrace. Like the fable of Adam and Eve, we see hell as a literary device. Hell is merely a metaphor for the isolated soul, which like all souls ultimately will be united in love with God. — Pope Francis

Love begins with a metaphor, which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetice memory.
pg 209 — Milan Kundera

People in Haiti eat dirt because it gives their starving bodies a false sense of satisfaction. But mud pies don't fill. They merely mask real hunger. [...] I saw the mud pies as a metaphor for the life of any Christian who has ever looked to something or someone other than God for fulfillment. — Jennifer Dukes Lee

Tristan was the soundtrack of my summer. The beat I walked to. The melody I breathed in and out. The lyrics I lived by. — Jessica Brody

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 on Shore and Sea, Her Face
Enchants all those whom once She doth embrace,
Nor is ther any can Her bewty prize
But he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:
Those following Leaves display, if well observed,
How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,
How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;
Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,
Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,
Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie. — James Howell

Twenty unsettling minutes later she dropped the
pen on her stack of papers, and then leaned back in her chair. The time seemed to be dragging like a immobile car without tires hooked to a tow-truck with square wheels traveling cautiously down a road of fresh gravel. Tess struggled to maintain focus, similar to how an alternator belt would struggle if it had to try to keep traction on a turn spindle that had been lubricated after an antifreeze leak. And similar to the - would be - alternator on the sidelines of that metaphor, Tess's enthusiasm for her after hours work was having difficulty in keeping charged up also. — Calvin W. Allison

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards. — Tana French