#metaphor

"Life' wrote a friend of mine, 'is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along."

"The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest."

"Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come."

"...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental."

"Our love went from fly to flower to butterfly, and it was meant to beautifully flutter, not sit still on a shelf like a trophy to be collected."

"Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard."

"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues....[But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."

"But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids.I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again,pulling me upward into light,to drown."

"Let me just pause a minute and drink in this moment. And if you film it, I’ll be able to get free refills for life."

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."

"She had eyes like sunsets, and every time she blinked it felt like the end of the world, otherwise known as night."

"Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies."

"Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts"shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water."

"I had to hand it to him, leaving the empty glove lying on the bed was an apt metaphor for love. Two things I can say about my grandpa are that he is wise, and his left hand is probably cold."

"The well-being of a neuron depends on its ability to communicate with other neurons. Studies have shown that electrical and chemical stimulation from both a neuron's inputs and its targets support vital cellular processes. Neurons unable to connect effectively with other neurons atrophy. Useless, an abandoned neuron will die."

"They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet."

"Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely."

"I’ll wear a maze on a necklace, dangling over my chest, because if you want to get at my heart, you have to be ready to lose yourself."

"The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects."

"Guilt is the toothache of the soul."