Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

Man is the circled oak; woman the ivy.

Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe.

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

Do you know what they say about big hands? Big gloves!

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

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

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

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

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

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.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

The river itself portrays humanity precisely, with its tortuous windings, its accumulation of driftwood, its unsuspected depths, and its crystalline shallows, singing in the Summer sun. Barriers may be built across its path, but they bring only power, as the conquering of an obstacle is always sure to do. Sometimes when the rocks and stone-clad hills loom large ahead, and eternity itself would be needed to carve a passage, there is an easy way around. The discovery of it makes the river sing with gladness and turns the murmurous deeps to living water, bright with ripples and foam.

My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will changeit,I'mwellaware, aswinterchangesthetrees. My Love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneatha source of little visible delight but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff.

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

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

‎"If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture--that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves." E.Abbey

Walt Kelly was much more interested in allegory and politics, and I'm much more interested in metaphors and myth.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it's not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it, but it's not fact.