Old Metaphors Quotes & Sayings

In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it. — Ruth Kluger

The age-old, seemingly inexorable process whereby diseases acquire meanings (by coming to stand for the deepest fears) and inflict stigma is always worth challenging, and it does seem to have more limited credibility in the modern world, among people willing to be modern - the process is under surveillance now. With this illness, one that elicits so much guilt and shame, the effort to detach it from these meanings, these metaphors, seems particularly liberating, even consoling. But the metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticized, belabored, used up. — Susan Sontag

I know my 17-year-old self would read my bourgeois fiction, full of metaphors and rhythmic prose, with a sinking heart. — Jim Crace

Immigration is a kind of pilgrimage. That's the way I see it. Just to go back to the desert, biblical metaphors, that's the story of great migration right there, the Old Testament. — Ruben Martinez

love thou the rose: yet leave it on its stem — William Shakespeare

Another reason we know that language could not determine thought is that when a language isn't up to the conceptual demands of its speakers, they don't scratch their heads dumbfounded (at least not for long); they simply change the language. They stretch it with metaphors and metonyms, borrow words and phrases from other languages, or coin new slang and jargon. (When you think about it, how else could it be? If people had trouble thinking without language, where would their language have come from-a committee of Martians?) Unstoppable change is the great given in linguistics, which is not why linguists roll their eyes at common claims such as that German is the optimal language of science, that only French allows for truly logical expression, and that indigenous languages are not appropriate for the modern world. As Ray Harlow put it, it's like saying, Computers were not discussed in Old English; therefore computers cannot be discussed in Modern English. — Steven Pinker

Plenty of things in the universe are old, my dear. That's like saying Florida is a metaphor for hell because they're both hot - though your grandfather would agree wholeheartedly with that, I suppose. — Sammy Nickalls

You used nunchucks on a moose?"
Wolfe got a haunted look in his eyes. "I used all sorts of things on that bastard. — Richelle Mead

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind. — David Lodge

Frodo: I can't recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I'm naked in the dark. There's nothing
no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.
Sam: Then let us be rid of it, once and for all. I can't carry the ring for you, but I can carry you! Comeon! — J.R.R. Tolkien

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. — C.S. Lewis

I knew now that we were never going to be a proper family again. — Caroline Green

You are here for a reason. — Deepak Chopra

The old botanical metaphors for memory, with their emphasis on continual, indeterminate organic growth, are, it turns out, remarkably apt. In fact, they seem to be more fitting than our new, fashionably high-tech metaphors, which equate biological memory with the precisely defined bits of digital data stored in databases and processed by computer chips. Governed by highly variable biological signals, chemical, electrical, and genetic, every aspect of human memory - the way it's formed, maintained, connected, recalled - has almost infinite gradations. Computer memory exists as simple binary bits - ones and zeros - that are processed through fixed circuits, which can be either open or closed but nothing in between. — Nicholas Carr

Good men must be affectionate men. — Samuel Richardson

The Larger A Purpose, The Bigger The Manifestation — Sunday Adelaja

But then the stage showed other things. Bad things. Murderous things. Things I would never really do. And things I would forget about in the morning, because I'd wake up feeling a whole lot better. I knew right from wrong, Ori and I both did. We were not terrible people. We were not fools. — Nova Ren Suma

Hell will freeze over before I send you any money for this unwarranted bill. — Jon Jones

Everyone at school knew who my dad was. It made me a little self-conscious a little introverted because I had a lot of attention drawn towards me, but in a way I guess it gives you a little bit of a celebrity skin, even though I wasn't a celebrity. — James McCartney

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark ... staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer. — Mark Haddon

That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard - of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition. — Friedrich Nietzsche

For just this moment, we have the closest thing to an advantage we're likely to get. And if we don't use it, we're gonna lose it. Look at me busting out all the tired old metaphors. Like I'd been saving them all winter just waiting for an opportunity to trot them out. — Cherie Priest

She had been amazed-and a little relieved-to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as the voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained-the side which is most commonly associated with visions of telepathy and that striking human ability to create images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.
There are no such things as flying saucers. — Stephen King

When we wrap God's truth around us, it protects us by strengthening our core being. — Stormie O'martian

We're an easy target for remarks about crossing the border and turning the clock back fifteen years, or a hundred. We're a state that's known for pineapples and cane toads, old bad attitudes and the brain-addling heat that comes from the Tropic of Capricorn sitting right across our middle. We're that kind of state - hot and steamy, unlovely and unloved, far too much fodder here for metaphors about festering and putrefaction. — Nick Earls