#metaphor

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them? ↗

— Mervyn Peake

#copy #cry #crying #despair #fall

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors. ↗

— Osip Mandelstam

#poetry #simile #simile

I read not so long ago about the construction of a large telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, where rainfall can average a millimetre a year and the air is fifty times as dry as the air in Death Valley. Needless to say, skies over the Atacama are pristine. The pilgrim astronomer ventures to the earth’s ravaged reaches in order to peer more keenly at other worlds, and I suppose the novelist is up to something similar. ↗

— Brad Leithauser

#astronomy #chile #metaphor #novelists #telescope

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#metaphor #mind #nature #change

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 water is the most abundant metaphor on earth. ↗

— Pam Houston

#malapropism #metaphor #water #life

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor. ↗

— John Cheever

#love

But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids.I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again,pulling me upward into light,to drown. ↗

— Sarah Dessen

#metaphor #inspirational

I had then and still retain an interest in science for its own sake and as a metaphor for our current lives. ↗

— Peter Hammill

#had #i #interest #lives #metaphor

Metaphor is embodied in language. ↗

— Dennis Potter

#language #metaphor

The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied. ↗

— Jeanette Winterson

#art