Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.
William Ewart Gladstone is credited with the credo that a prime minister must be a "good butcher. " The metaphor is apt insofar as the root of the word "decision" is "to cut. "
I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.
Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Language is memory and metaphor.
Face, to me, is a metaphor of sadness. And I want to share this sadness. I'm not really interested whether it's an Indian face or not - that's not as important for me. But it's still important to establish the relationships in order to bring about a consciousness of our fragility.
If you really understand something, you can: 1) explain it using a clear metaphor and 2) explain the strongest counter-argument to the idea.
There are things that I love in Iranian cinema and things that I don't. In Iranian cinema, you have to use metaphor because you are living under a dictatorship.
With a horror movie, you're making a metaphor. You're making a personalized nightmare for the protagonist.
If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in sixteenth-century Spain, which is already going through secularization, industrialization, modernization. He goes out to kill a giant, and instead he collides with this huge windmill and injures himself and also damages the windmill. I think that's a metaphor for the collisions we all have over time, as our ideas of ourselves get out of synch with the historical moment.
Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.
I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of. ' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.
But the poetry side is what appeals more to me today. Metaphor, just absurd linkages and coming up with categories, labeling, taxonomy, and I'd say that I do have some tools left. There are days I can't make a sentence out of anything, and anything I make looks clunky to me. But I still have a general grasp of the cliché, of the generic sentence. And if I didn't have that, I'd be a blob of putty on the floor.
I'm not interested in a film about golf but I am interested in golf as a metaphor.
The metaphor is the story, not the character.
If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.
Clay can be a metaphor for many things. I made it a metaphor for flesh and earth, and these are two kinds of generic givens of life, if you look at it poetically, biblically, the idea of the life of beings, of man, being transitory, the earth abides-ashes to ashes, dust to dust-man returns to earth, grows out of earth like a flower, wilts, goes back to the earth. . . We are frail, transitory creatures with aspirations of immortality, conscious of our inevitable death, and we have to deal with it somehow.
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
Metaphor has traditionally been regarded as the matrix and pattern of the figures of speech.