Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.
A great brand is a story that’s never completely told. A brand is a metaphorical story that connects with something very deep – a fundamental appreciation of mythology. Stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience.
When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.
I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.
On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.
A metaphorical weight lifted from his allegorical chest and Artemis Fowl felt himself again.
Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.
When you start writing, you have your characters on a metaphorical paved road, and as they go down it, all these other roads become available that they can go down. And a lot of writers have roadblocks in front of those roads: they won’t allow their characters to go down those roads. . . I’ve never put any roadblocks on any of these paths. My characters can go wherever they would naturally go, and I’ll follow them.
We do two things in life: We race the clock and everything is a struggle. One way or not, it's a metaphorical battle all of the time.
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers, can name the unnamable and communicate the unknowable.
All knowledge is ultimately rooted in metaphorical (or analogical) modes of perception and thought.
