metaphor

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding.

Some say you have only one shot in life, well if you get ammo, you can reload.

Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

In the middle, the river was a deep green, scattered with rocks poking their noses up for a breath. The water charged around them, creating eddies and whirlpools. Closer to the bank, the current dragged lengths of weed along with it so it seemed that long-haired women swam just under the surface, never coming up for air.

He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern__ name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn__ do anything at all.

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the _olian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

Boundaries help us to distinguish our property so that we can take care of it. They help us to "guard our heart with all diligence." We need to keep things that will nurture us inside our fences and keep things that will harm us outside.

Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.

This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.

He sips his drink and it leaves his handlebar mustache dripping like a cattle dog come outta a river.

Life is a hurricane, and we board up to save what we can and bow low to the earth to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach. We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. We love each other fiercely, while we live and after we die. We survive; we are savages.

A faint tickling on the back of his right hand caused Eragon to look down. A huge, wingless cricket clung to his glove. The insect was hideous: black and bulbous, with barbed legs and a massive skull-like head. Its carapace gleamed like oil.

You know what they say about air and water when it comes to fire, don__ you?_ she

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

So this is the boom, eh?_ I said. __ot exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?_ ____l tell you what it__ like,_ he said glumly. __t__ like being in Caligula__ Rome, and everyone around you__ having an orgy, and you__e the mug stuck looking after the horse._ He pulled heavily on his cigarette. __he whole thing__l come crashing down,_ he said bleakly, __nd all anyone__l have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese.

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.