Metaphor Funny Quotes

The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.

There is probably no better or more reliable measure of whether a woman has spent time in ugly duckling status at some point or all throughout her life than her inability to digest a sincere compliment. Although it could be a matter of modesty, or could be attributed to shyness- although too many serious wounds are carelessly written off as "nothing but shyness"- more often a compliment is stuttered around about because it sets up an automatic and unpleasant dialogue in the woman's mind. If you say how lovely she is, or how beautiful her art is, or compliment anything else her soul took part in, inspired, or suffused, something in her mind says she is undeserving and you, the complimentor, are an idiot for thinking such a thing to begin with. Rather than understand that the beauty of her soul shines through when she is being herself, the woman changes the subject and effectively snatches nourishment away from the soul-self, which thrives on being acknowledged." "I must admit, I sometimes find it useful in my practice to delineate the various typologies of personality as cats and hens and ducks and swans and so forth. If warranted, I might ask my client to assume for a moment that she is a swan who does not realzie it. Assume also for a moment that she has been brought up by or is currently surrounded by ducks. There is nothing wrong with ducks, I assure them, or with swans. But ducks are ducks and swans are swans. Sometimes to make the point I have to move to other animal metaphors. I like to use mice. What if you were raised by the mice people? But what if you're, say, a swan. Swans and mice hate each other's food for the most part. They each think the other smells funny. They are not interested in spending time together, and if they did, one would be constantly harassing the other. But what if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny? What you had no long snaky tail to carry in the air on tail-carrying day? What if wherever you went you tried to walk like a mouse, but you waddled instead? What if you tried to talk like a mouse, but insteade out came a honk every time? Wouldn't you be the most miserable creature in the world? The answer is an inequivocal yes. So why, if this is all so and too true, do women keep trying to bend and fold themselves into shapes that are not theirs? I must say, from years of clinical observation of this problem, that most of the time it is not because of deep-seated masochism or a malignant dedication to self-destruction or anything of that nature. More often it is because the woman simply doesn't know any better. She is unmothered.

Martin was dafter than a syphilitic polecat - where do I get these metaphors from?

It gets worse. Josh tell her that he loves her. She says it back. He touches her. She touches him back. And then they're losing their virginity on the floor of her bedroom beside her pet rabbit, Isis. A rabbit. Josh literally lost his virginity in front of a metaphor for sex.

We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.

Occasionally, a dog will be presented as some training method for having a baby. "My girlfriend and I got a dog. We are going to see if we can handle that before we have kids." This is a little like testing the waters of being a vegetarian by having lettuce on your burger. Okay, maybe that metaphor doesn't make sense, but neither does using a dog as a training method for having a baby.

I grunted, hauling the rope hand over hand. A plaintive squeak came from the pulley system with each draw, as if I had strapped some unfortunate mouse to a torture device and was twisting with glee.

I'm like a circus standing on two legs.

But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of the reason we love music. That ambiguity allows listeners to psychologically tailor a song to suit their needs, sensibilities, and situations, but words can limit that, too. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others. In Beyonce's song "Irreplaceable," she rhymes "minute" with "minute," and I cringe every time I hear it (partly because by that point I'm singing along). On my own song "Astronaut," I wrap up with the line "feel like I'm an astronaut," which seems like the dumbest metaphor for alienation ever. Ugh.

The human species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.

Some men are like dormant volcanoes, always ready to explode with anger. And also always ready to ejaculate everywhere with little warning. Plus they’re often crusty. Metaphorically, I mean. You don’t want a man who is literally crusty ejaculating on you. That would be a safety hazard and is probably how plague is spread. But my original point is that some seemingly quiet men anger easily. (Sorry. That metaphor got away from me a bit. I’d fix it but this is what editors are for.)

May knew John had a very bad tendency, when things got unusually difficult, to sink with an almost sensuous pleasure into a warm bath of despair. Once you’ve handed the reins over to despair, to mix a metaphor just a teeny bit, your job is done. You don’t have to sweat it any more, you’ve taken yourself out of the game. Despair is the bench, and you are warming it.

...so much has been laid on the sunset—heavy-handed metaphors, sentimental music. Everyone’s always walking into them, and that is some very intense light. Maybe that’s where the term “love is blind” comes from, because so many people are walking into sunsets, burning out their corneas.

Every animal is a tradition, and together they are a vast part of our heritage as human beings. No animal completely lacks humanity, yet no person is ever completely human. By ourselves, we people are simply balls of protoplasm. We merge with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers. Then we become funny or tragic; we can be loved, hated, pitied, and admired. For us, animals are all the strange, beautiful, pitiable, and frightening things that they have ever been: gods, slaves, totems, sages, tricksters, devils, clowns, companions, lovers, and far more.

It was freezing, but the cold effortlessly numbed my feet and aching hands. I walked quietly, barefoot, to the end of the block, leaving my shoes behind to remind me how to find my way home. I stood at the end of the street, catching snow in my mouth, and laughed softly to myself as I realized that without my insomnia and anxiety and pain I’d never have been awake to see the city that never sleeps asleep and blanketed up for winter. I smiled and felt silly, but in the best possible way. As I turned and looked back toward the hotel I noticed that my footprints leading out into the city were mismatched. One side was glistening, small and white. The other was misshapen from my limp and each heel was pooled with spots of bright red blood. It struck me as a metaphor for my life. One side light and magical. Always seeing the good. Lucky. The other side bloodied, stumbling. Never quite able to keep up. It was like the Jesus-beach-footprint-in-the-sand poem, except with less Jesus and more bleeding. It was my life, there in white and red. And I was grateful for it. “Um, miss?” It was the man from the front desk leaning tentatively out of the front door with a concerned look on his face. “Coming,” I said. I felt a bit foolish and considered trying to clarify but then thought better of it. There was no way to explain to this stranger how my mental illness had just gifted me with a magical moment. I realized it would have sounded a bit crazy, but that made sense. After all, I was a bit crazy. And I didn’t even have to pretend to be good at it. I was a damn natural.

You didn't need to do that," Morriumur said to me. "I came into this knowing I would be isolated." "Yeah, well, I rarely let go of someone once I have my teeth in them," I said. "It's the warrior's way." "What a . . . profoundly disturbing metaphor," Morriumur said, settling back down. - Spensa & Morriumur; Starsight; Brandon Sanderson Skyward Series

The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...

She knew deep down that magazines were a dinosaur, and her real job was to dodge the asteroid as long as possible.

The post knocks a chunk of granite loose, and the rock tumbles down the course, smacking every obstacle in its path until it crashes twenty feet in front of us. If there was ever a metaphor for my life, well... that's it.

Besides, I wasn't the only one with sleep problems, as Victor had been talking in his sleep since he was a kid. When he was eight he was travelling with his dad and sat up in a darkened hotel room at two a.m., opened his eyes, and raised his arm to point toward the dark hall, saying, "Who's that man standing in the corner?" Then he lay back down and went straight back to sleep while his father quietly shit himself. Metaphorically. Probably.

I'm the one who should apologize,' he said. 'I want to help, but I know I won't be able to. I haven't go the answers to anything.' 'That's what men think, isn't it?' 'What?' 'That unless you've got some answer, unless you can say, "Oh, I know this bloke in Essex Road who can fix that for you", then it's not worth bothering.' Will shifted in his seat and didn't say anything. That was precisely what he thought; in fact, he had spent half the evening trying to think of the name of the bloke in Essex Road, metaphorically speaking.

I'd been so tired of 'strong female characters' for so long by then. I was so tired of the way female strength was made to look cold and humorless; the way it was characterized as deviant and 'unnatural' and always lonely and exceptional. I was tired of the grim undertone of tragedy that lurked under its surface. 'Strong female characters' were never funny, and they never had any fun, either. More often than not, they were celibate, friendless, and clinically depressed. Their monomaniacal devotion to crime fighting made them lean, cranky, and impatient. Naturally, they had axes to grind: they were avenging brides, poker-faced assassins, gloomy ninjas with commitment issues. Who were these characters? What were they trying to tell us? Why didn't they ever say goodbye before hanging up the phone? And why were they always being reborn or remade as killing machines after losing everything they held dear? ...I don't want to see another symbolic woman start all over again. I want to see the symbolic world change to acknowledge her existence. I don't want to see a young girl get a makeover or go shopping with her boyfriend's credit card. I want to watch her blow up the Death Star - metaphorically, of course.

In American Lit class once, we discussed America as a metaphor tying it into how the country is represented in books, movies, songs. You know, America is a melting pot. America is a mixed salad. America is a shining city on a hill. America is the country where a skinny kid with a funny name can defeat the odds and become president. But America doesn’t seem like any of those things anymore. Maybe it never was.

Well,’ said Crowley, who’d been thinking about this until his head ached, ‘haven’t you ever wondered about it all? You know – your people and my people, Heaven and Hell, good and evil, all that sort of thing? I mean, why?’ ‘As I recall,’ said the angel, stiffly, ‘there was the rebellion and—’ ‘Ah, yes. And why did it happen, eh? I mean, it didn’t have to, did it?’ said Crowley, a manic look in his eye. ‘Anyone who could build a universe in six days isn’t going to let a little thing like that happen. Unless they want it to, of course.’ ‘Oh, come on. Be sensible,’ said Aziraphale, doubtfully. ‘That’s not good advice,’ said Crowley. ‘That’s not good advice at all. If you sit down and think about it sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying “THIS IS IT!”?’ ‘I don’t remember any neon.’ ‘Metaphorically, I mean. I mean, why do that if you really don’t want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you’ve built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can’t be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire. And don’t bother to answer. If we could understand, we wouldn’t be us. Because it’s all – all—’ INEFFABLE, said the figure feeding the ducks. ‘Yeah. Right. Thanks.’ They watched the tall stranger carefully dispose of the empty bag in a litter bin, and stalk away across the grass. Then Crowley shook his head. ‘What was I saying?’ he said. ‘Don’t know,’ said Aziraphale. ‘Nothing very important, I think.

I've been meaning to ask you since I hung this up . . . , " he said, looking at it. "Why did you choose to represent yourself as a duck?" "What do you mean?" I answered. "That was the assignment." "Yes, but why a duck?" he said. "Is it safe to assume that is was because of the story of the . . . um, the duckling that turns into a swan?" "No," I laughed, shaking my head. "It's because I think I look like a duck." "Oh!" said Mr. Tushman, his eyes opening wide. He started laughing. "Really? Huh. Here I was looking for symbolism and metaphors and, um . . . sometimes a duck is just a duck!" "Yeah, I guess," I said, not quite getting why he though that was so funny. He laughed to himself a good thirty seconds.

That’s exactly a summary of what it does. To get more jargony: it does impulse control, emotional regulation, long-term planning, gratification postponements, executive function. It’s the part of the brain that attempts to tell you, “You know, this seems like a good idea right now, but trust me, you’ll regret it. Don’t do it.” It’s the most recently evolved part of our brains. Our frontal cortex is proportionately bigger and more complex than that of any other primate. And, most interesting, it’s the last part of the brain to get fully wired up. The frontal cortex is not fully online until people are, on average, about a quarter century old. It’s boggling, but it also tells you a lot about why adolescents act in adolescent ways; it’s because the frontal cortex isn’t very powerful yet. And that has an interesting implication, which is that if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, by definition it’s the part least constrained by genes and most shaped by experience. So the frontal cortex is your moral barometer, if that’s the right metaphor. It’s the Calvinist voice whispering in your head. So, for example, the frontal cortex plays a central role if you’re tempted to lie about something; and if you manage to avoid that temptation, your frontal cortex had something to do with it. But at the same time, if you do decide to lie, your frontal cortex helps you to do so: “Okay, control my voice, don’t make eye contact, don’t let my face do something funny.” That’s a frontal task too. This is a very human, very complicated part of our brains.

The best advice came from the legendary actor the late Sir John Mills, who I sat next to backstage at a lecture we were doing together. He told me he considered the key to public speaking to be this: “Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” Inspired words. And it changed the way I spoke publicly from then on. Keep it short. Keep it from the heart. Men tend to think that they have to be funny, witty, or incisive onstage. You don’t. You just have to be honest. If you can be intimate and give the inside story--emotions, doubts, struggles, fears, the lot--then people will respond. I went on to give thanks all around the world to some of the biggest corporations in business--and I always tried to live by that. Make it personal, and people will stand beside you. As I started to do bigger and bigger events for companies, I wrongly assumed that I should, in turn, start to look much smarter and speak more “corporately.” I was dead wrong--and I learned that fast. When we pretend, people get bored. But stay yourself, talk intimately, and keep the message simple, and it doesn’t matter what the hell you wear. It does, though, take courage, in front of five thousand people, to open yourself up and say you really struggle with self-doubt. Especially when you are meant to be there as a motivational speaker. But if you keep it real, then you give people something real to take away. “If he can, then so can I” is always going to be a powerful message. For kids, for businessmen--and for aspiring adventurers. I really am pretty average. I promise you. Ask Shara…ask Hugo. I am ordinary, but I am determined. I did, though--as the corporation started to pay me more--begin to doubt whether I was really worth the money. It all seemed kind of weird to me. I mean, was my talk a hundred times better now than the one I gave in the Drakensberg Mountains? No. But on the other hand, if you can help people feel stronger and more capable because of what you tell them, then it becomes worthwhile for companies in ways that are impossible to quantify. If that wasn’t true, then I wouldn’t get asked to speak so often, still to this day. And the story of Everest--a mountain, like life, and like business--is always going to work as a metaphor. You have got to work together, work hard, and go the extra mile. Look after each other, be ambitious, and take calculated, well-timed risks. Give your heart to the goal, and it will repay you. Now, are we talking business or climbing? That’s what I mean.

So Japan is allied with Germany and they’re like “Sweet the rest of the world already hates us let’s take their land!” So they start invading China and Malaysia and the Philippines and just whatever else but then they’re like “Hmm what if America tries to stop us? Ooh! Let’s surprise attack Hawaii!” So that’s exactly what they do. The attack is very successful but only in a strictly technical sense. To put it in perspective, let’s try a metaphor. Let’s say you’re having a barbecue but you don’t want to get stung by any bees so you find your local beehive and just go crazy on it with a baseball bat. Make sense? THEN YOU MUST BE JAPAN IN THE ’40s. WHO ELSE WOULD EVER DO THIS? So the U.S. swarms on Japan, obviously but that’s where our bee metaphor breaks down because while bees can sting you they cannot put you in concentration camps (or at least, I haven’t met any bees that can do that). Yeah, after that surprise attack on Pearl Harbor everybody on the West Coast is like “OMG WE’RE AT WAR WITH JAPAN AND THERE ARE JAPANESE DUDES LIVING ALLLL AROUND US.” I mean, they already banned Japanese immigration like a decade before but there are still Japanese dudes all over the coast and what’s more those Japanese dudes are living right next door to all the important aircraft factories and landing strips and shipyards and farmland and forests and bridges almost as if those types of things are EVERYWHERE and thus impossible not to live next door to. Whatever, it’s pretty suspicious. Now, at this point, nothing has been sabotaged and some people think that means they’re safe. But not military geniuses like Earl Warren who points out that the only reason there’s been no sabotage is that the Japanese are waiting for their moment and the fact that there has been no sabotage yet is ALL THE PROOF WE NEED to determine that sabotage is being planned. Frank Roosevelt hears this and he’s like “That’s some pretty shaky logic but I really don’t like Japanese people. Okay, go ahead.” So he passes an executive order that just says “Any enemy ex-patriots can be kicked out of any war zone I designate. P.S.: California, Oregon, and Washington are war zones have fun with that.” So they kick all the Japanese off the coast forcing them to sell everything they own but people are still not satisfied. They’re like “Those guys look funny! We can’t have funny-looking dudes roaming around this is wartime! We gotta lock ’em up.” And FDR is like “Okay, sure.” So they herd all the Japanese into big camps where they are concentrated in large numbers like a hundred and ten thousand people total and then the military is like “Okay, guys we will let you go if you fill out this loyalty questionnaire that says you love the United States and are totally down to be in our army” and some dudes are like “Sweet, free release!” but some dudes are like “Seriously? You just put me in jail for being Asian. This country is just one giant asshole and it’s squatting directly over my head.” And the military is like “Ooh, sorry to hear that buddy looks like you’re gonna stay here for the whole war. Meanwhile your friends get to go fight and die FOR FREEDOM.

He hesitated. “Nothing, man. What are you doing right now?” I looked down. “Petting my snake.” Malcolm laughed. “With anyone else, that would be a metaphor. Good thing I can always count on you.

You have buttered your bread. Now you must lie on it.

The answer is a special closing session called “If These Were My Last Remarks.” The session features approximately twenty participants, each of whom is given two minutes to tell the group what they would say if this were the end of their life. People read poems, share stories about their faith, confess doubts, recall tragedies large and small. “It’s motivating, it’s touching, it’s tragic, and it kind of seals the bond,” Gelles said. Notably, by asking the participants to contemplate their actual, physical mortality, the group is subtly reminded to confront its metaphorical mortality. Most important, though, the group is being shown itself in dramatic fashion before it disperses. This is who we were here—open, vulnerable, thoughtful, funny, complicated. Tribe-making is vital to meaning-making.

Nate wouldn't say he panicked. Nate would not say he shat his metaphorical pants. Nate would not say those things, but they were still true.

- The trouble is that man, going back to Freud - and excuse the metaphor - heats up like a light bulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand - and this is pure science - heats up like an iron, slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her. Like the steel furnaces in Vizcaya! I weighed up Fermin's thermodynamic theories.

The elite began to evacuate from the forest. They were the future of their guilds and were delicate flowers that their guilds had worked hard to cultivate. They couldn't let themselves be ravaged by Lord Grim.

Natural selection may be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but if so, it's selfish about genes, not individuals. The story goes that J. B. S. Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his brother and he said he wouldn't, but he would happily do so for two brothers or eight cousins. Only a biologist would say something like that, but Haldane was nicely expressing how evolution works.

I thought somehow he would sense my disapproval and change his life in order to gain my favor. In short, I withheld love. I knew what I was doing was wrong. It was selfish. And what’s more, it would never work. By withholding love from my friend, he became defensive. He didn’t like me. He thought I was judgmental, snobbish, proud, and mean. Rather than being drawn to me, wanting to change, he was repulsed. I was guilty of using love like money, withholding to get somebody to be who I wanted them to be. I was making a mess of everything. And I was disobeying God...I had fallen miles short of God’s aim...I repented. I replaced economic metaphor with something different, a free gift metaphor, or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the myre, and toward healing. I knew this is the way God loved me. God never withheld love to teach me a lesson. Here is something simple about relationships [I discovered]: nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them... After I repented, things were different. But the difference wasn’t with my friend. The difference was with me. Before I had all this judgementalism and pride and loathing of other people. I hated it. And now I was set free. I was free to love. I didn’t have to discipline anybody, I didn’t have to judge anybody, I could treat everybody as though they were my best friend, as though they were rockstars or famous poets, as though they were amazing, and to me, they became amazing. Especially my new friend. I loved him. After I decided to let go of judging him, I discovered that he was very funny. I mean, really hilarious. And he was smart. Quite brilliant really. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. I felt as though I had lost an enemy, and gained a brother. And then he began to change. It didn’t matter to me whether he did or not, but he did. He began to get a little more serious about God...He was a great human being getting even better. I could feel God’s love for him. I loved the fact that it wasn’t my responsibility to change somebody, that it was God’s. That my part was just to communicate love.

Over the past decade, its Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society series has featured such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, actress Glenn Close, dancer Mark Morris, and economist Robert Shiller. At the 2006 meeting in Atlanta, Frank Gehry was invited to discuss the relationship between architecture and neuroscience. After the talk, an audience member (actually it was me) asked him, “Mr. Gehry, how do you create?” His answer was both intuitive and funny: “There is a gear [in my brain] that turns and lights a light bulb and turns a something and energizes this hand, and it picks up a pen and intuitively gets a piece of white paper and starts jiggling and wriggling and makes a sketch. And the sketch somehow relates to all the stuff I took in.”4 Gehry’s answer is a perfect metaphoric formulation of the evolving neuronal assembly trajectory concept, the idea that the activity of a group of neurons is somehow ignited in the brain, which passes its content to another ensemble (from “gear to light bulb”), and the second ensemble to a third, and so forth until a muscular action or thought is produced. Creating ideas is that simple. To support cognitive operations effectively, the brain should self-generate large quantities of cell assembly sequences.

They say the odds of us being conceived come out to one in four hundred trillion; the fact that we’re alive, healthy and able to work from nine to five is literally a miracle. I once heard a Buddhist metaphor that described the amazing probability of this ‘miracle’: Imagine a lifebuoy thrown into an ocean, and a single turtle living somewhere in all the oceans, swimming around underwater. The chances of my being conceived were the same as the odds of Mr Turtle sticking his head out of the water straight into the middle of that life donut – or the same as the chances of my dad having an orgasm sober.

It's just as good as in the movies," Sam says. For a moment, I think she means us, and I'm about to argue that it's better and movies are stupid, but then I realize she means the fountains. "It's okay." "Just okay?" She tries to turn in my arms, but I tighten them around her, pulling her back flush with my chest. "Hush. I'm trying to watch this okay water show." When she laughs, I feel like I've hit a home run. Who knew I could be funny? I'm probably not funny anyone but her, but she's the only one who matters. I tuck my chin over the top of her head, and I feel like I'm holding Sam prisoner. She sighs, relaxing into me, happy to have me as her warden. Okay, that metaphor got away from me a little bit. But I don't care. I won't overthink it - that's my new mantra and goal. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I lie in bed, worrying.

I find amusement in life’s metaphors and ironies They seem to fit in with such ease

the world is a funny old place where one should never, metaphorically speaking, be so proud as to turn down the offer of a perfectly good hot meat pie.

It's a funny thing about being alone. You never really notice it when it's happening. You're aware that nobody else is there, but [...] as with wading into cold water, you acclimate to the relative solitude until it doesn't even bother you anymore. You don't realize that your hands and toes have grown numb until there is a sudden burst of warmth that sends needles through your extremities.