Figurative Expression Quotes

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

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.

A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.

I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences; Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I'm sure I'd love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.

Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.

But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.

It was an instant weight lifted off my chest - both literally and figuratively.

In comparing these two writers, he [Samuel Johnson] used this expression: "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." This was a short and a figurative statement of his distinction between drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners, but I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Richardson, and that his dial plates are brighter.

English literature is a flying fish.

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

It is through the human figure that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life.

Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons, or Celts, Can't seem just to say anything is the thing it is but have to go out of their way to say that it is like something else.

I love thee like puddings; if thou wert pie I'd eat thee.

It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

Ithink Isaid'All menare Jews excepttheydon't know it.'I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.

Poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me. I like to poem my way through tricky questions and ideas. That's about the only consistent thread through my poem-creation process.

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.

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

Never thought I'd be a bobble-head, but little did I know.

Sir, what is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.

Metaphors. This was the cost of making out with an artist.