Share your favourite metaphors here, either from something you have read or have written. In their book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson propose that human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know. Metaphors are literary devices that imaginatively draw a comparison between two unlike things. They enrich creative writing. Here are some classics: “The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid near and nearer the sill of the world.” —Lord of the Flies, William Golding “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!” —Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare “My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.” —Fault In Our Stars, John Green “Memories are bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.” ―Kill the Dead, Richard Kadrey Please share your metaphors next!
I am writing a story as we speak. One character (the narrator) is bright and happy. The other is dark and serious. So, the last line I wrote was: She was rain to my shine.
Sylvia Plath wrote a poem entitled Metaphors to describe her pregnancy. “Metaphors” by Sylvia Plath I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of a well-read man?” ~ Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry. A great singer is he who sings our silences. How can you sing if your mouth be filled with food? How shall your hand be raised in blessing if it is filled with gold? They say the nightingale pierces his bosom with a thorn when he sings his love song. —“Sand and Foam,” Khalil Gibran
But now, O Lord, You are our Father; We are the clay, and You our potter; And all we are the work of Your hand. - Isaiah 64:8 - Bible A silk tent, inflated. Thus - and with a slit of escape. The chorus girls can trickle out of it like lollypops falling from a torn bag - the Cubicle City by Janet Flanner.
"Life' wrote a friend of mine, "is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along." ~ E.M. Forster, A Room with a View.
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” ― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer's Night Dream
'Reality is a cliche' from which we escape by metaphor.' ~ Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.
Not my favourite and not even a metaphor but recently heard it in a movie and it was just so beautiful. 'I love you more than the rain loves the wind.' --Nikita Afonso, More Than Anyone
Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? By William Shakespeare Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
You are my fire / The one desire / Believe when I say I want it that way —“I Want It That Way,” Backstreet Boys
"It's a hat on a hat." This is from the chess episode, where Tyson kills Gary Kasparov and frees Bobby Fischer's brain from Deep Blue. There's another episode where Cormac McCarthy is stalked by John Updike disguised as a chupacabra. That one's good too. I'm going through all the episodes again.
To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever. Edward Abbey In Ancient Greece, Socrates had a great reputation of wisdom. One day, someone came to find the great philosopher and said to him: - Do you know what I just heard about your friend? - A moment, replied Socrates. Before you tell me, I would like to test you the three sieves. - The three sieves? - Yes, continued Socrates. Before telling anything about the others, it's good to take the time to filter what you mean. I call it the test of the three sieves. The first sieve is the TRUTH. Have you checked if what you're going to tell me is true? - No, I just heard it. - Very good! So, you don't know if it's true. We continue with the second sieve, that of KINDNESS. What you want to tell me about my friend, is it good? - Oh, no! On the contrary. - So, questioned Socrates, you want to tell me bad things about him and you're not even sure they're true? Maybe you can still pass the test of the third sieve, that of UTILITY. Is it useful that I know what you're going to tell me about this friend? - No, not really. - So, concluded Socrates, what you were going to tell me is neither true, nor good, nor useful. Why, then, did you want to tell me this?
From Pride and Prejudice: “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy. “Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Macbeth, Shakespeare
“I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.” ― Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.” ― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
I’m currently reading (and enjoying) Troy Senik’s A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, and one of the chapters has the following opening: Every presidency is, at some level, music. George Washington’s was a stately, majestic march. Lincoln’s was a sweeping, melancholy pastoral. FDR’s—at least pre-World War II—was pure jazz, largely improvised but irresistibly energetic. Up through the summer of 1886, Grover Cleveland’s felt a bit like a harpsichord recital: exacting, precise, and joyless. No one doubted that the president was taking his responsibility seriously. In fact, his sense of duty bordered on an obsession. Less clear was whether he was actually enjoying any of it.
The excerpt below is from The River of Doubt by Candice Millard, a non-fiction story covering Theodore Roosevelt’s excursion into an uncharted region of the Amazon Rainforest. I appreciate Millard’s jungle imagery, as well as her metaphor in the last sentence. If Roosevelt had been able to see the rain forest from a distance, he could have watched it breathe. As the trees transpire, or, in a sense, sweat, they pump water into the atmosphere from their leaves. In the warm air, the water quickly evaporates and is recycled as rain. As the ex-president stood at the river’s edge, surveying the jungle he had hoped to master and explore, the forest surrounding him met the dawn by exhaling thin white clouds of condensing moisture that rose over the canopy above him like the breath of a wolf on a winter morning.
Calls to mind the Gaia hypothesis - that the Earth and all its biological systems are one huge entire entity
