Metaphors In Poetry Quotes & Sayings

Comic strips introduced me to metaphors. They are pure metaphor, so you learn how to tell a story with symbols, which is a very valuable thing to learn. And I learned that from motion pictures, too, and from poetry. Poetry is mainly metaphor. If it doesn't have a metaphor, it doesn't work. — Ray Bradbury

Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes. — Jill Lepore

I think poetry without metaphor is like husband and wife living in separate bedrooms. — Munia Khan

Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms. Don't force yourself too hard. Take it easy. Over the years you may catch up to, move even with, and pass T. S. Eliot on your way to other pastures. You say you don't understand Dylan Thomas? Yes, but your ganglion does, and your secret wits, and all your unborn children. Read him, as you can read a horse with your eyes, set free and charging over an endless green meadow on a windy day. — Ray Bradbury

You, my reader, who see me close, wonder about my heartbeats and measure my words, you my close friend who know my eyes and the home of their prose, you, my only lover, who always move my life, my poetry's pace and rhyme,...
I can not disclose the shape of metaphors, nor what they bashfully display behind the robes of their naked source; but you can use the eyes of heart to feel what they are made of.
And if it's a tear or a smile I evoke, it means we are human, it means we care and we love.
It means we are both beautiful. (Soar) — Soar

I am not at all the kind who can forget the tarnish on the reverse side of the brightest coin. — V.C. Andrews

for those memories are now
just like these little kittens
I hold in my hands

those can be kissed
and treasured
but not held too tightly. — Sanober Khan

I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk. — Sidney Lanier

The strongest are those who renounce their own times and become a living part of those yet to come. The strongest and the rarest. — Milovan Djilas

She was a poetry book with the wrong dust jacket, shelved in the Reference section. — Joyce Rachelle

This much is all I ask of my accusers: when my sons grow up, avenge yourselves by causing them the same kind of grief that I caused you, if you think they care for money or anything else more than they care for virtue, or if they think they are somebody when they are nobody.
Reproach them as I reproach you, that they do not care for the right things and think they are worthy when they are not worthy of anything. If you do this, I shall have been justly treated by you, and my sons also.
Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one. — Plato

Every experience will fill with immediacy. Because I love this, I am never bored. Beauty constantly wells up like the noise of springwater in my ear. Tree limbs rise and fall like ecstatic arms. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. The green felt cover slips; we get a flash of the mirror underneath. The conventional opinion of this poetry is that it shows great optimism for the future. But Father Reason says, No need to announce the future. This now is it. Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment's energy here in your hand. — Rumi

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artifact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. — M. John Harrison

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

A Japanese woman we'd met in Paris came to the apartment yesterday and spent several hours explaining our appliances. The microwave, the water kettle, the electric bathtub: everything blinks and bleeps and calls out in the middle of the night. I'd wondered what the rice maker was carrying on about, and Reiko told us that it was on a timer and simply wanted us to know that it was present and ready for duty. That was the kettle's story as well, while the tub was just being an asshole and waking us up for no reason. — David Sedaris

There's a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point. — Paul Thomas Anderson

The match I struck shall not run dead
You're my first inhale, my last cigarette. — Mie Hansson

Those who are comfortable with imagination appreciate metaphors and symbols. Those who are not prefer the literal. Only through metaphors and symbols can one convey the conceptual. Without poetry, you cannot communicate ideas that are not material and measurable, like love, or justice or remarkability. But — Devdutt Pattanaik

Mankind's obsession with money and greed has them going down a one way street to their demise. — Steven Magee

You touched my heart...ever so softly
and I realized
tears had never been...merely salt

and the rain
Oh the Rain!
had never been merely water. — Sanober Khan

I try to think of metaphors that suit him best, but he was made of the sea and the stars and the sun, and one wouldn't do him justice. — Zorgie Adriana Sanchez

You are my drug of choice, and I plan to overdose. — Angie Stanton

love ridden
i searched for you
in corridors,
open doors
and in endless seas
of similes
and metaphors
but we never were
on the same page. — K.Y. Robinson

Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding — Saul Williams

The poet wants to 'say' something. Why, then, doesn't he say it directly and fortrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether. — Cleanth Brooks

True poetry is composed of metaphors and symbols which are born in the heart, rise like clouds, and assume a celestial form; verses formed otherwise are not poetry, but only artificial words, each of which contradicts the feelings inside. The utterances and words that have not been formed in a person's soul as the voice of conscience are all hollow, no matter how embellished they are or how dazzling they seem to be. — M. Fethullah Gulen

Witchcraft offers the model of a religion of poetry, not theology. It presents metaphors, not doctrines, and leaves open the possibility of reconciliation of science and religion, of many ways of knowing. — Starhawk

The irreligious don't repent at all and the religious only repent of sins. But Christians repent of their wrongfully placed righteousness. — Timothy Keller

Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition
not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop. — Stephen Dobyns

In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors. — Ymatruz

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don't you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or some other instinct. — Robert Frost

We have a 'now you see Him, now you don't' God. We have Himself clothed in visions, in dreams, in metaphors, in parables, in the poetry of the Bible, and in all the ordinariness of the lives we live. — Luci Shaw

Maybe poetry is the only way we can get near the truth of God. ... And when the metaphors fail, we think it's God who's failed us! — Mary Doria Russell

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry. — Alexander Pope