Metaphor is the lifeblood of language. And no one knows this better than poets. As the month of April comes to a close, and with it National Poetry Month, it would behoove all of us writers, poets or not, to remind ourselves of the power of the metaphor. Here’s a round-up of writers on metaphor:
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius.”
—Aristotle
“I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one.”
—Bernard Malamud
“I know that I’m going to die and that you’re going to die. I can’t do anything about that. But I can explore it through a metaphor and make a kind of funny, dark story about it, and in doing so, really exhaust and research as many aspects of it as I can imagine. And in a way, that does give me some closure.”
—Chuck Palahniuk
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.”
—Daniel Pink
“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.”
—Percival Everett
“A noble metaphor, when it is placed to an advantage, casts a kind of glory around it, and darts a luster through a whole sentence.”
—Joseph Addison
“All things are metaphors.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically dead has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word.”
—George Orwell
“That’s what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!”
—Michael Connelly
“The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.”
—Jose Ortega y Gasset
“For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors—which is the logic of narratives in general—over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
—Ken Liu
“All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.”
—G. K. Chesterton
“I think zombies have always been an easy metaphor for hard times. Because they’re this big, faceless, brainless group of evil things that will work tirelessly to destroy you and think of nothing else.”
—Seth Grahame-Smith
“Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader’s daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.”
—John le Carré
“The ogres and witches and giants of fairytales stand in as metaphors for those obstacles that we all face in our own lives.”
—Kate Forsyth
“In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don’t believe in them in the traditional sense.”
—Tabitha King
“I always thought of vampires, especially the young-adult ones, as a metaphor for sex—sucking blood, forbidden, taboo. I think they just ooze sex. Vampires are all the big themes in life in one attractive, bloodsucking package.”
—Melissa de la Cruz
“I’ve spoken often of how the fantasy genre is able to, with the greatest freedom among all the genres, take a metaphor and make it real. But of course that’s only the starting point.”
—Steven Erikson
“Quest is at the heart of what I do—the holy grail, and the terror that you’ll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.”
—Jeanette Winterson
“Of course I didn’t pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.”
—Joanne Harris
“I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life’s mystery and unpredictability, of life’s generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.”
—Jane Smiley
“My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you’re not quite ready for, ever.”
—Mary Gordon
“We use metaphors to express our own truths.”
—Lynn Nottage
“Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”
—Robert Frost
This post originally appeared at Career Authors