"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."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"The nail that sticks out farthest gets hammered the hardest."
— Patrick Jones (Nailed)

"He turns his back to the far shore and rows toward it. He can in this way travel away from, yet still see, his house....he feels he is riding a floating skeleton...Some birds in the almost-dark are flying as close to their reflections as possible."
— Michael Ondaatje (Divisadero)

"METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact."
— Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: El Chico mas Lindo del Mundo)

"Admiration is the daughter of ignorance."
— Thomas Fuller

"I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me."
— Haruki Murakami

"All that is transitory is but a metaphor."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables."
— Werner Heisenberg

"Life is like a B-picture script."
— Kirk Douglas

"The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man"
— Jose Ortega y Gasset

"The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.

It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray.

At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.
But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward."
— Terence McKenna

"Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. "
— Henry David Thoreau

"At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests."

(William Arrowsmith,”The Future of Teaching”) "
— William Arrowsmith (Cuttlefish Bones)

"Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how to profoundly question, and how to playfully define.

Spontaneity of speculation being synonymous with the philosophical-poetic, the philosophical-poetic with the rural philosopher-poet, and by roundelay the rural philosopher-poet thee with the spontaneity of speculation be.

And by the way of the rural what may we say?
A philosopher-poet of illimitable space we say.

Iohannes Scottus Ériugena the metaphor of old salutes you; salutes your lyrical ear and your skilful strumming of the rippling harp.

(Source: Hearing in the Write, Canto 19, Ivy-muffled)"
— Richard McSweeney (Hearing in the Write)

"The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied."
— Jeanette Winterson (Art & Lies)

"Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon ..."
— Wallace Stevens

"Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing."
— Steve Grand (Creation: Life and How to Make It)

"There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows….. I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

from, The Book of Disquiet"
— Pessoa, Fernando

"... we [can] catch fish and just throw them back... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then... one [may] swallow the hook...[it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I've swallowed it big time. "
— Graham McNamee (Acceleration)

"'For the people of my country,' Renato said, 'water is everything: love, life, religion...even God.'

'It is like that for me too,' I said. 'In English we call that a metaphor.'

'Of course,' said Renato, 'and water is the most abundant metaphor on earth.'"
— Pam Houston (Waltzing the Cat)