metaphor

A man's words reveal, first, the man. The words are not the man, and yet they reveal him faithfully and are to be identified with him. Out of the abundance of the heart, the man speaks. The foundational nature of all language is therefore metaphorical because every word a man speaks reveals himself__ust as God reveals Himself through the Word. Every word spoken ultimately reveals the speaker.

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

It symbolizes a spear, and in this sorry world the symbol is the thing.

You either see it or you don't

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

Snowflake__ journey is a metaphor. A metaphor for what, exactly?I have no freaking clue.

That cloak of love you were wearing__e__ torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?

Time is a river...and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.

I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.

Determination is learning to form a habit, and never breaking it in future.

... the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things__ike composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale. One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water. I didn__ work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things. Literary composition can be a similar process. The writer__ real world and the writer__ fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text. But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration. It__ world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.

How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had stayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart.

If the rowan's roots are shallow, it bears no crown.

Long before they had ever met, I think this destiny awaited them. They were not like ships passing in the night. It wasn't like they didn't understand each other. They understood each other better than anyone else, and each was focused solely on the other.

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.

Living a good life is like flipping pancakes. If you hesitate, it splatters all over the place.

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.