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1 " This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief --like a whisper of wind--when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man. "
― Edward Abbey , Desert Solitaire
2 " Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case. "
― Michael Connelly , The Brass Verdict (Harry Bosch, #14; Mickey Haller, #2; Harry Bosch Universe, #18)
3 " In order to fit our needs and wants, we are constantly adjusting and altering our behaviors and feelings. Metaphorically speaking, we are constantly giving birth to priorities; our priorities are perpetually reassessed and we perpetually adjust to accomplish them.Some call this " Change." I call it, improving ourselves by means through the inner self. "
4 " We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Problem of Pain
5 " A lot of people will ask me “Whats depression like?”. Its the same answer every time. “Its shitty...”. But you know whats its really like? Its like a bundle of dark clouds falling over your head, raining constantly. So your drenched. You cant function properly, you can’t do the things you love because your fingers slip and you mess up. Your clothes metaphorically are like your life, you try to change them, but they only stay dry for a few seconds, then its the same old story all over again. And no one, I repeat no one, wants to be near you. Your a wet, soaking, depressed and helpless kitten lost in depressions firm grip. Its like a stalker, it follows you. Everywhere you go, Its waiting for you. You can’t leave it. You can’t ignore it. Its always there. Thats what makes it so scary. You can never get away from it, unless, someone pushes those fiery and dark clouds away. If their willing to sacrifice everything just to make you happy. Even if that means taking those clouds upon themselves. "
6 " Turning and climbing, the double helix evolved to an operation which had always existed as a possibility for mankind, the eating of light. The appetite for light was ancient. Light had been eaten metaphorically in ritual transubstantiations. Poets had declared that to be is to be a variable of light, that this peach, and even this persimmon, is light. But the peach which mediated between light and the appetite for light interfered with the taste of light, and obscured the appetite it aroused.The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols. But the simple instruction, promulgated during the Primordification, to taste the source of the food in the food, led to the ability to eat light. Out of the attempt to taste sources came the ability to detect unpleasant chemicals. These had to be omitted. Eaters learned to taste the animal in the meat, and the animal's food and drink, and to taste the waters and sugars in the melon. The discriminations grew finer - children learned to eat the qualities of the pear as they ate its flesh, and to taste its slow ripening in autumn sunlight. In the ripeness of the orange they recapitulated the history of the orange. Two results occurred. First, the children were quick to surpass the adults, and with their unspoiled tastes, and their desire for light, they learned the flavor of the soil in which the blueberry grew, and the salty sweetness of the plankton in the sea trout, but they also became attentive to the taste of sunlight. Soon there were attempts to keep fruit of certain vintages: the pears of a superbly comfortable autumn in Anjou, or the oranges of Seville from a year so seasonless that their modulations of bouquet were unsurpassed for decades. Fruit was eaten as a retrospective of light. Second, children of each new generation grew more clearly, until children were shaped as correctly as crystals. The laws governing the operations of growth shone through their perfect exemplification. Life became intellectually transparent. (" Desire" ) "
7 " In some aspects losing a child is like a wall, but instead of getting over it, you must carry the wall with you, wherever you go, for as long as you live.The wall is immovable.You can’t go anywhere until you learn to move the wall.You are just stuck in the same place, forever.You can tug and tug all you want, there are days that the wall will not move.And there are days that it moves ever so slightly.Over time I have realized that in order to move forward, knowing that I must bring this wall with me, that the best way to do so is to metaphorically flood the soil near the wall with water, and have the wall float with me, instead of me having to carry it.Every act of love and kindness turns to water.Water and love can penetrate and move anything.It just takes time. I need to turn my wall into a raft. "
― , Again (Every Breath Is Gold #2)
8 " What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so. "
― S.A. Tawks , The Spirit of Imagination (The Spirit Series Book 1)
9 " People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error. "
― Steven Pinker , The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
10 " All philosophic propositions, every attempt to think including all acts of oral or written articulation of an argument and metaphorically expressed ideas, are subject to the dynamics and limitations of human language. The spoken thought is only part of any philosophic message; the other part is unsaid because it is unsayable. The crux of any philosophic proposition reverberates in the echo of silence, the thought that lies in-between the lines. "
11 " All evil, all injustice, all harm that one does to someone else—in sum, all deviation from man's normative nature—in a much more fundamental way and in a far more ultimate sense one does to oneself, and not just metaphorically but literally. "
12 " I felt the back of my neck crawl. The crawling reached around to the corners of my jaw, then up to my temple, and across my cheeks.I reached up to touch it. Splinters, small fingers, hooks. Scraping at my fingertips, gouging. Slowly reaching for my eyes, reaching for my remaining flesh. Tiny, like the legs of spiders, pincers, fish hooks, they stabbed and set themselves into the flesh that remained, around my mouth, near my eyes, at my forehead. Then they stopped. Waited.Asking. Offering. A deal with the devil, metaphorically speaking.Give up your face if you truly want wings. Give up your eyes. I could hear the dragon screech, not all that far away. This crisis I faced was removed from a very large, very real crisis that threatened people and Others I cared a great deal about.Do it, and you can fly. Fly, and you might be able to do something to save them. "
― Wildbow
13 " It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happens at all. "
14 " More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it's just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how you dispense it. Confront your own values. Decide what it is you are looking for an then look for it. Perform connoisseurship. We all need to create our own vocabulary of appreciation, or we are trapped by the vocabulary of others. "
― Phyllis Rose , The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading
15 " how can he love me then not? He went,he ran. And I cannot bring him back. Yet I left the door metaphorically wide open, hoping he'd come back and bang on it proclaiming, " I want to be here with you. Always." Soon I'm going to have to shutit. For my safety and my sanity. Let go. I don't want to. Won't letting go be just that - letting go? Giving up? Admitting failure? Admitting that it is really, truly over? "
16 " Someone put opera on inside the house. Someone changed it to hip-hop, thank God. Someone started a shower. Someone vacuumed. Again.Life. In all its mundane majesty.And you couldn't take advantage of it if you were sitting on your ass in the shadows... whether it was in actuality, or metaphorically because you were trapped in an attic's darkness. "
― J.R. Ward , Black Dagger Brotherhood Collection (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #1-9)
17 " You see," the tourist went on, " you know that thing you do with seaweed?" Bethan, brought up on the Vortex Plains, had only heard of the sea in stories, and had decided she didn't like it. She looked blank. " Eat it?" " No, what you do is, you hang it up outside your door, and it tells you if it's going to rain." Another thing Bethan had learned was that there was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and that all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on it as it turned a corner." I see," she said. " Rincewind is like that, you see." " Like seaweed." " Yes. If there was anything at all to be frightened about, he'd be frightened. But he's not. The star is just about the only thing I've ever seen him not frightened of. If he's not worried, then take it from me, there's nothing to be worried about." " It's not going to rain?" said Bethan. " Well, no, metaphorically speaking." " Oh." Bethan decided not to ask what " metaphorically" meant, in case it had something to do with seaweed. "
18 " Damn it. What are we exactly calling a 'masculine problem'? Did he have trouble running the flag up? Or did it fall to half staff?" Do we have to speak about this metaphorically or-" " Yes," Leo said firmly." All right. He..." Poppy frowned in concentration as she searched for the right words, " ... left me while the flag was still flying. "
19 " NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist. "
― John Green , The Fault in Our Stars
20 " If I could only escape, if I could only escape... he murmured the words to himself a dozen times; then metaphorically shook himself for being so impractical, so romantic, so dutiless. "