Metaphorical Meaning Quotes

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.

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.

I think that 'Mary Poppins' needs a subtle reader, in many respects, to grasp all its implications, and I understand that these cannot be translated in terms of the film.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Standing knee deep in a river and dying of thirst.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Language is remarkable, except under the extreme constraints of mathematics and logic, it never can talk only about what it's supposed to talk about but is always spreading around.

You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation; you revel in the smoke that the words send up.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

I really liked that documentary, 'Room 237.'

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

You can't ask me to explain the lyrics because I won't do it.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

The songs that work best are broad lyrically and have one strong concept in the metaphor.

I've been dreaming of mirrors. Millions of mirrors, reflecting people to death.

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.