James Geary Quotes

Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish.

It'is like a book, I think, this bloomin' world.

Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases.

A figure of speech is a shifty thing; it can be twisted or it can be straight.

I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

The laws of literature, like the laws of gossip, usually demand exaggeration, decontextualization, a heightened or minimalized reality, and a lot more shape and order and impact than everyday life.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

My work should be seen as poetry.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

Poets are always right. History is on their side.

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

When it comes to the lyrics, I write about my own perception of things and use characters for that.

I often write about the moon, and more often than not, it is to symbolise a person, or a quality.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations.

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.