Figurative Language Quotes

“Tulips were a tray of jewels.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“And again and again fell the word, like the ebb of a dying sea.

"Good-bye.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Your love for me does not exist in the real world. Yes, it is love, I do not deny it. But not every love has a course to run, smooth or otherwise, and this love has no course at all . . . But that is remote from love and remote from ordinary life. As real people we do not exist for each other.”
― Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head

“Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“He didn't really care if they felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality—talk, footsteps, slamming doors—which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“If I could dam up the flow of Duck River channel its waters into my inkstone pool I'd use it up expressing my congratulations and I could celebrate your birthday forever.”
― Daichō Rōryō

“Having the world as you wish--that is not for the young," he added, "They want too much.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“I've somehow run myself into hell. There must be many entrances.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

“She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gunpoint.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“He's a funny one," said Ida. "Here's how he sound." She pursed her lips and, expertly, imitated the red-winged blackbird's call: not the liquid piping of the wood thrush, which dipped down into the dry tchh tchh tchh of the cricket's birr and up again in delerious, sobbing trills; not the clear, three-note whistle of the chickadee or even the blue jay's rough cry, which was like a rusty gate creaking. This was an abrupt, whirring, unfamiliar cry, a scream of warning -congeree!- which choked itself off on a subdued, fluting note.”
― Donna Tartt

“What can I possibly be hiding in a heart that's still the size of a tiny sparrow?”
― Kim Dong Hwa, The Color of Water

“Alas! that Henry should fade away as reality emerged, and only her love for him should remain clear, stamped with his image like the cameos we rescue out of dreams.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his cleverness a ghost, he knew where it was he wanted to lay his head.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn

“When Rachel asks him about days before his life as a Wolff, he will scowl and fidget and so she learns to wait for his recollections and, because it is so difficult for him, she will listen without speaking, collecting the pieces of his past painstakingly like a jigsaw maker, or a batsman accumulating runs, in awe of the impossible distance between a sliver of blue and a great sky, between three runs and a century, between a shard of memory and memory itself.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Miranda waited, then said, 'But what will I do for a whole year?'

Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Get better. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to health filled her with black sand.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick—she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up. She was the ugly girl at the ball.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“This had been happening more and more often: the two of us come upon each other by accident in the early hours of the morning and take solace in each others' company, weathering out the peril of being awake at this time of night, when thoughts that are neatly ordered or justly murdered during the day come loose from their moorings and out of their graves, to tie themselves to each other in new and dangerous ways.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“The literal sense of the author was "creation is the orderly act of a loving Creator God." What the modern reader often hears, however, is "The universe was made in six 24-hour days." This is as wrong-headed as taking me to mean I actually stood in line a million years or that my cardiac tissue has been torn in half or that Christ had delusions of being a grape plant.
-- Making Senses of Scripture”
― Mark Shea

“i felt my face turn scarlet as if the sun were burning me alive”
― ruth ware

“There was . . . a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri's room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching