Lynn Nottage Quotes

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Language is memory and metaphor.

Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

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

Human writing reflects that of the universe; it is its translation, but also its metaphor: it says something totally different, and it says the same thing.

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise?

My fans have always loved my metaphors.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality, it then becomes dense and masks the truth it is meant to display.

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

Words are a strange thing. You once saw an animal and decided it's a 'cat.' But cat is a sound. This cat has nothing to do with the animal. But I have decided it's a cat. So a cat it is.

Words are merely utterances: noises that stand for feelings, thoughts, and experience. They are symbols. Signs. Insignias. They are not Truth. They are not the real thing.

A word is no light matter. Words have with truth been called fossil poetry, each, that is, a symbol of a creative thought.

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.