Metaphor Quotes

“All public life sustains itself through metaphor.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Metaphor thus becomes, crucially, a contested field; it also becomes visible as a weapon in the ideological armoury by means of which history is interpreted, or reinterpreted, from the perspective of the conquerer.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“…metaphors themselves are time-bound and ideologically motivated.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“…metaphor have something in common with, for example, the paintings of M.C.Esher, or the Rorshach blot, both of which are famously indecipherable or, at least, irreducible to a single interpretation: they can never fully reveal their own meanings because they are perennially on the point of turning into their other.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Thus, one might say, the dream can never be read literally, because its very substance is metaphor...”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Certainly metaphor is in some sense the opposite of concrete thing.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Perhaps all play is metaphor, perhaps all metaphor is play.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“...only too frequently, our metaphors are not our own.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“...the struggle to form the new is inevitably already shaped by the metaphors by which we have come to live.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“... metaphor is never static, and rarely innocent.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“For metaphor, we may suggest, is not simply a matter of what appears on the printed page or in, for example, the work of visual art; it is rather the bodying-forth [stet] of sets of correspondences of which, in some sense, we have all, in specific interpretative communities, been aware in what we might define as a liminal way, hovering somewhere around the threshold of articulation.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Even the rose, with its traditional connotations of fragrance and purity, can appear in different situations, which underlines the very important point that metaphor is primarily contextual.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“… ‘metaphor’ itself is not a static, ahistorical term; it is not as though there is a pervasive, universal concept of metaphor which can be applied, like a template, to all ages and cultures.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“The term ‘metaphor’ itself is seen to identify a verbal process whereby two discrete objects or ideas become linked, but in a very particular way, such that, for the duration of the metaphor, one of the items actually becomes the other, and vice versa.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Does metaphor mean something more than, or different form, or in some sense beneath, what it appears to say; or is the meaning of a metaphor precisely what it does say.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“A common error about metaphor is to suppose that it can be in some sense ‘unpacked’. When that unpacking takes place, what is left is rarely of any value; it seems a paltry and colourless thing when compared to the metaphor itself.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences (‘this stands for that’), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“...it seeks to ‘fix’ our understanding, but at the same time it reveals how any such fixity, and such desire for stability and certainty, is constructed on shifting sands.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“Metaphor makes us look at the world afresh, but it often does so by challenging our notions of the similarities that exist between things; how alike they are; and in what ways, in fact, they are irreconcilably unalike.”
― David Punter, Metaphor

“…although metaphor undoubtedly deals in likenesses, similarity, it also deals in unlikeness and dissimilarity.”
― David Punter, Metaphor