Bodhidharma Quotes

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

Science always uses metaphor.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imagination, to enlarge our understanding or perception of human experience and observation.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

One's capacity for metaphor is one's capacity for a full life.

Silence isn't golden. It's yellow.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.