c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Social networking platforms drove man closer to those in neighboring continents, while driving him further apart from those in his neighborhood.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Facebook has more than 1 billion members, which by population makes it the third largest country in the world—somewhere between India and the United States. Who’s sending missionaries to that country? Who’s planting churches there?
— Phil Cooke
Hey, that’s why they in­vented the In­ter­net, her­manita. To talk about weird shit and down­load porn.
— Ann Aguirre, Blue Diablo
Thou shalt not tweet to be retweeted.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The Internet gives us everything and forces us to filter it not by the workings of culture, but with our own brains. This risks creating six billion separate encyclopedias, which would prevent any common understanding whatsoever.
— Umberto Eco
Thou shalt not unfollow someone, merely because they stopped following you.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Thou shalt not follow someone, merely because they are following you.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
An open internet is an open platform for debating opposing views. It allows unpopular voices to be heard.
— Newton Lee, Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness
Thanks to the internet, you can provoke thoughts of those in mansions, from the uncomfortableness of your shack.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If you don't believe in hyperspace you become more and more false and irrelevant every day.
— Akutra-Ramses Atenosis Cea
You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense. (1949)
— Murray Leinster, A Logic Named Joe
Thou shalt not think that thou be a leader, merely because thee be having more than 0 followers.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is a cookie trail of all my interests lodged in some digital sphere which will one day consolidate the collected data of six billion souls and vomit out—I don't know—personalized infomercials for deodorant and car wax.
— J. Lincoln Fenn, Poe
But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history...
— Adam Nevill, Last Days
They’re called sock puppets. We create armies of artificial online personas – user accounts that espouse views certain interested parties want espoused. We flood forums, online comment sections, social media. ... It’s amazing what a few people and a little money can accomplish online. Our puppets have turned whole elections. … Everything the public sees is managed. If there’s a valuable brand to protect – whether it’s a person or a dish soap – these fuckers are out there protecting it, shaping the narrative. I mean… who the hell follows dish soap on Twitter? How does anyone believe that shit’s real? (p. 292-294)
— Daniel Suarez, Kill Decision
WOW DID I JUST SEE LIL B?THE MYTH ?? THE AMERICAN HERO AND LEGEND? WORLD WIDE LEGEND! I MEAN I DIDNT EVEN THINK HE WAS HUMAN
— Brandon McCartney
If ever I create a website, I'll call it Two-Face Book, and I'll invite everyone to it, it will be a game board, of a whitewash chalkboard.A social network, with reserved intentions, where we can fall into our cliques and circle of friends. We can dis who we want and accept who appeals to our discretion. Where the users will keep abusing, and abusers keep using, where the computer bullies will keep swinging and the J-birds that fly by will die; where the lonely will keep seeking and the needy still go desperate, where the envious will keep hating, and the lustful will keep flashing. Where those that think ignoring, will keep one down and the wannabes will foolishly think themselves greater by the number of "likes" that pours caffeine into their coffee. We can jump on the bandwagon of likes, or reserve not to show we care. Where the scorners, scammers and stalkers lay wait to take hold of the innocent and fragile, and my pockets will get fatter as more and more will join up, where being fake is accepted. As a mirror that stares at a different face. It will be my two-face epilogue, in a 3-world dimension, of a twofold war. I will build an empire of contagious hooks, and still we will live, happily-ever disastrous.
— Anthony Liccione
Everyone on the Internet is talking about television and everyone on television is talking about the Internet. The whole damn thing is a self-licking ice cream cone and you're blaming me?
— Daniel Suarez, Kill Decision
She navigated away from the Parish Council message board and dropped into her favorite medical website, where she painstakingly entered the words "brain" and "death" in the search box.The suggestions were endless. Shirley scrolled through the possibilities, her mild eyes rolling up and down, wondering to which of these deadly conditions, some of them unpronounceable, she owed her present happiness.
— J.K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy
F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is that even the writer can't tell if what they're creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel. It's an attempt to insert humor where none exists, on the off chance that a potential reader will only be pleased if they suspect they're being entertained. Of course, the reader isn't really sure, either. They just want to know when they're supposed to pretend to be amused.
— Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur
Valentine's day without your love is like a year without the Internet.
— Santosh Kalwar
Technology is cold, find a real hand to hold.
— Paul McGirl
A few years ago a friend said that I use to hunt and fish and build houses and things but now my whole life revolved around my computer I replied "But my computer revolves around the world
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Return to Stantasyland
Hippos are the very definition of Disney cute. There is no way you could look at a big, fat, squishy, huggable hippo and not think, "Id she could talk like a human, she would sound just like Jada Pinkett Smith and be oh so sassy." You would totally name her Sassy-baskets, and she would be your tutu-wearing, ballet-dancing, strut-walking pal for life. Just you and Sassy-baskets against the world!
— Cracked.com, You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News
One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
I remember a time where Trolls were a fictitious monster from fairy tales, not arseholes on the internet looking for attention.
— Robert O'Sullivan
«“Everybody is in trouble with my dad. My dad only sort of gets the Internet. My dad started looking up all his old enemies on Facebook. My dad picks big flamewar fights. It’s like my dad just discovered that people can talk about politics without his permission. Facebook is like his new drug, he’s getting all sweaty and manic... Farfalla, is Facebook the work of the Devil? Google is ‘not evil,’ but nobody ever said that Facebook was ‘not evil.’”»
— Bruce Sterling, Love is Strange
This could seem counterintuitive for many dictators running communist or socialist single-party states, but a thriving private tech industry can contribute invaluable tools to help you implement a controllable internet. The reason is fairly simple: the technologies that transform internet applications into more personalized, efficient and enjoyable experiences are usually the same ones that increase the capacity to monitor its users.
— Laurier Rochon, The Dictator's Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention
The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.
— Mark O'Connell, Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever
«Brixie wasn’t talking to him, or listening to him. Nothing like that at all. Brixie was off in her own world, flaming away like a blowtorch. She was such an Internet fiend that she had never learned any other way to behave.»
— Bruce Sterling, Love is Strange
New solutions win by virtue of adoption, and they don't get adopted if they're bad solutions.
— John Perry Barlow
I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in "How tall was" and I saw "How tall was Jesus," and I'm like, "Sure," and half an hour later you're somewhere you didn't expect to be. It doesn't work that same way in books, does it? Even if you have an encyclopedia, the trail isn't that crazy. I like that aspect of it.
— David Sedaris
I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I'm drowning in ellipses.
— Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
I always thought of it like you said, that all the strings inside him broke. But there are a thousand ways to look at it: maybe the strings break, or maybe our ships sink, or maybe we’re grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is alive. We don’t suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters. If you choose the strings, then you’re imagining a world in which you can become irreparably broken. If you choose the grass, you’re saying that we are all infinitely interconnected, that we can use these root systems not only to understand one another but to become one another. The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?
— John Green, Paper Towns
the road is life
— Jack Kerouac
I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.
— Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere
Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue
— Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.
— Malcolm X
I always think of each night as a song. Or each moment as a song. But now I'm seeing we don't live in a single song. We move from song to song, from lyric to lyric, from chord to chord. There is no ending here. It's an infinite playlist.
— David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
— Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like ared flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front ofsomeone who was annoyed by it.
— Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
They say the eyes are the window to the soul.
— Wendy Mass, A Mango-Shaped Space
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
— Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research
But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Your mind is a cupboard and you stock the shelves.
— Thomas S. Monson
Love is a piano dropped from a four story window and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. -Two Little Girls (Little Plastic Castle)
— Ani DiFranco
Anyone else feel like that? Like your life's a big act. Like you're trying to be a man when you're just a scared kid, trying to keep under control when you really want to scream, cry, maybe hit someone. Ever feel like you're breathing underwater, and you have to stop because you're gulping in too much fluid?
— Alex Flinn, Breathing Underwater
Some regard private enterprise as if it were a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look upon it as a cow that they can milk. Only a handful see it for what it really is--the strong horse that pulls the whole cart.
— Winston S. Churchill
But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable,walking through this life half-sleeping,everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids.I didn't care if they sang to me.All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again,pulling me upward into light,to drown.
— Sarah Dessen, Dreamland
Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
If funkytown was a trailerpark, this guy would be a double-wide.
— Maya Angelou
They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241)
— Ilsa J. Bick, Drowning Instinct
Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.
— Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon, an accompanying guide who remembers your calling.The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon its keeper, especially when neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into its shell, but it cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.It has much to do with feelings of uniqueness, of grandeur and with the restlessness of the heart, its impatience, its dissatisfaction, its yearning. It needs its share of beauty. It wants to be seen, witnessed, accorded recognition, particularly by the person who is its caretaker. Metaphoric images are its first unlearned language, which provides the poetic basis of mind, making possible communication between all people and all things by means of metaphors
— James Hillman
What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?""No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.""I see. And these are the clowns?"Foaly's head poked through the doorway."Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?
— Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl
She's all over us like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with one pickpocket yesterday.
— Tamora Pierce, Bloodhound
It doesn't seem to matter what we think...The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.
— Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
— Roberto Bolaño, 2666
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
I’m going to destroy you, little man!" Sourcefield yelled after me. "I’ll rip you apart like a piece of tissue paper in a hurricane!""Wow," I said, reaching an intersection and taking cover by an old mailbox."What?" Tia asked."That was a really good metaphor.
— Brandon Sanderson, Firefight
The buzzing was like the eager purr of a muscle car that had just been started, but left in neutral. That was another of Cody’s metaphors for it; I’d said the sensation felt like an unbalanced washing machine filled with a hundred epileptic chimpanzees. Pretty proud of that one.
— Brandon Sanderson, Steelheart
I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.
— Juliet Marillier, Heir to Sevenwaters
It is the job of the market to turn the base material of our emotions into gold.
— Andrei Codrescu, Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio
Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
A river of images and thoughts and feelings, dirtied and polluted so that no one could drink from it without gagging.
— Barry Lyga, I Hunt Killers
The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.
— Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied.
— Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
METAPHOR: A tightly fitting suit of metal, generally tin, which entirely encloses the wearer, both impeding free movement and preventing emotional expression and/or social contact.
— Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: El Chico más Listo del Mundo
We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
— Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Life is like a B-picture script.
— Kirk Douglas
Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Only with a leafcan I talk of the forest,
— Visar Zhiti, The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry
Sand was dribbling out of the bag of her attention, faster and faster.
— Sarah Blake
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?
— Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2
It was my turn to be silent while a small family of moments crossed my path, single file, from the left, sticking their tongues out at me.
— Roger Zelazny, The Hand of Oberon
She felt about a love set as a painter does about his masterpiece; each ace serve was a form of brushwork to her, and her fantastically accurate shot-placing was certainly a study in composition.
— Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939
Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking fromThe weight of primary noon ...
— Wallace Stevens
... we [can] catch fish and just throw them back... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then... one [may] swallow the hook...[it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowed the hook, there's no losing it. Me, I've swallowed it big time. 
— Graham McNamee, Acceleration
They're holding flushes of face cards, and I think we're the pot.
— Howard Tayler, Emperor Pius Dei
It would not be fair to say that the fire stole my faith, since in truth it has been slipping away from me all my life, flipping between my fingers like a shiny little minnow--such a far cry from the trophy salmon that dangled from my father's fist.
— Elissa Janine Hoole, Kiss the Morning Star
In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.
— Craig Raine, Heartbreak
Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life. The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan. The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.
— Jaimal Yogis, Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea
Mason took in enough cannabis smoke to allow a Lipan Apache manipulating a blanket over it to transmit the complete works of Tennyson.
— Richard Condon, Money Is Love
They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Æolian 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.
— Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal the mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.
— William Shakespeare, Richard II
At present the universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.
— William Arrowsmith
My master gives me bread and beer and every good thing.
— Garret Keizer, God of Beer
Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.
— Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
You will never be missing to yourself and all you can do is delay, delay, delay and the delaying must be good enough for you and you must find a way to be fine with the delay because it is your whole life and the minute you really go missing is the minute you can no longer miss.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
Old beliefs do not lead you to new cheese
— Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?
when he was afraid to changed he had been holding on to the illusion of Old Cheese that was no longer there
— Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?
This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself.
— Catherine Lacey, The Answers
He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year's Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he'd completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
The motive for metaphor ... is a desire to associate, and finally to identify, the human mind with what goes on outside it, because the only genuine joy you can have is in those rare moments when you feel that although we may know in part, as Paul says, we are also a part of what we know.
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
Your Mom's Car. Think about that. Try to wrap your brain around the supernatural and spiritual implications that the name bears down you. Your Mom's Car, holding its hand out straight, fingers curled, a zombie reaching for your neck.
— Dan Chaon, Ill Will
Charter boats are like books with no covers.
— Tania Aebi
I couldn't decide what kind of person she was, whether she was one of those insects that look exactly like wasps but aren't . . . I just wanted to know if she would sting.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
In the last week I felt her withdrawing. What was once everywhere, an ocean I imagined myself to be drowning in, was now barely deep enough to bathe in. I saw her warmth draining away and I couldn't stop it.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
I saw a doctor. I went in case there were any remnants of the summer inside me—sticky, slender fish bones that needed to be scraped into the bin. He was dismissive of my concerns and said my body would have let me know by now. Did I have what was known as female intuition? I said I'd had my feminine intuition somewhat scrambled in the past.
— Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy
Is that true," I asked, "that song?""It is a metaphor," said Mrs. Davis, "it has metaphorical truth.""And the end of the mechanical age," I said, "is that a metaphor?""The end of the mechanical age," said Mrs. Davis, "is in my judgment an actuality straining to become a metaphor. One must wish it luck, I suppose. One must cheer it on. Intellectual rigor demands that we give these damned metaphors every chance, even if they are inimical to personal well-being and comfort. We have a duty to understand everything, whether we like it or not–a duty I would scant if I could." At that moment the water jumped into the boat and sank us.
— Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
Despite which, Charlie seems doomed to stumble around in the dark, clutching pieces of a puzzle he still can't see.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.
— Ally Condie, Matched
My father, a Palestinian, and my mother, an Israeli, met in a bar in New York. Their encounter was a blue shift. An anomaly. A collision. In the end, I understand, it is only for this we live. All I ever wanted was to love.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
Metaphorically, organizations are like vegetable gardens, where each capability is a different type of vegetable growing in the garden.
— Pearl Zhu, Digital Capability: Building Lego Like Capability Into Business Competency
Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Eloise's name and lured, too, by Eloise's conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the cousin was that in this golden age of peace and ever watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across this earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off light bulbs they aren't prepared for torches and forget that wings can burn.
— Ada Palmer, Seven Surrenders
Whether or not he was in it, whether or not he could see or touch it, he'd thought there would always be a FIllory out there somewhere. He loved knowing it was there. It anchored his sense of happiness, the way a distant stockpile of gold might underwrite the value of a paper bill.
— Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land
I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?
— Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories
Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things.
— Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories
I’d begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.
— Mark O'Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
He finds himself entering a minefield of dietary choices." My Dark Experiences With Gluten
— ash bunsee
They were coming back to his mother's neighborhood now, the eastern boundary of which was a bridge spanning a know of train tracks that cut through the city like a zipper.
— Nathan Hill
You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a "genetic" approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. "Is that a metaphor?" I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no.
— Donald Barthelme
I set the coffee aside and got a cup of water instead. I could never see why people drank that stuff. It tasted like soil boiled in mud, wit a topping of dirt.
— Brandon Sanderson, Calamity
...both he and she were creek beds, quiet when they were full and quiet when they were dry. But when they were half-full, wearing a coat of shallow water, the current bumped over the rocks and valleys in the creek beds, wearing down the earth. Giving someone else a little of who they were hurt more than giving up none or all of it.
— Anna-Marie McLemore, When the Moon Was Ours
It's like raking leaves in the wind.
— Charlie Raymond
The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.
— Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge
I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...
— Ruth Rendell, The Killing Doll
The birds are literal representations of the witnesses of those ordinary and big moments, but they are also metaphors for time itself, for the passing of time. It occurred to me, many years after I had been here, thinking about this idea, that every moment we have with one another is really our only moment, and because of that our every moment could potentially be a goodbye, so we have to notice and notice and notice.
— David Gianadda, Everything You Say Is Goodbye
A chill swept through the air, the sort of graveyard kiss promising bad news to follow.
— Katherine McIntyre, Rising for Autumn
The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells
— Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal
in our culture, women can do anything a man can. and vice versa."don alfonso's eyebrows shot up. "i do not believe it.""it's true," sally said defiantly."in America, the women hunt while the men have babies?
— Douglas Preston, The Codex
There's a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes... but it's still the only giant peach in town. Even if it's wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.
— Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations
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.
— Brandon Sanderson, Steelheart
The point is that if you think you can pinpoint the cause, then you can fool yourself into thinking you can avert the cause. It's deeply egotistical. It's life played as a grand insurance policy. Our myth-making around cancer stems from the same impulse. Because we don't know exactly why most of it happens, we weave a makeshift wisdom around it, a false prophet, which seeps into the common story and feeds our hunger to understand why. The guilt is a byproduct, a way to assign blame and seek absolution. It's a lesser evil than the forces of randomness. And it gives us the illusion of control.
— Alanna Mitchell, Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
I still remember the flush of blood in her cheeks as she danced. She was all the raw colours of life, the crude beauty of nature. I am the human concept of beauty. Gold made soft and supple in man's form.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the wall toward them.
— Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter
Metaphorically, governance is like a “Steer,” Risk Management is like a “Brake.
— Pearl Zhu, Digitizing Boardroom: The Multifaceted Aspects of Digital Ready Boards
He has a vision of his life as a sliver of soap, worn and used and smoothed into a slender, blunt-edged arrow-head, a little more of it disintegrating with every day.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.
— Tana French, Broken Harbour
. . .the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn't really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
In those hours he is awake and prowling through the building, he sometimes feels he is a demon who has disguised himself as a human, and only at night is it safe to shed the costume he must wear by daylight, and indulge his true nature.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
When did we all become fluent in this language that none of us wanted to learn?
— Louise O'Neill, Asking For It
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.
— Henry Cloud, Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life
Don't stir all the warmth out of your coffee
—  drink it.
In short, if you are using a shovel to dig yourself into a hole, a credit card company will be happy to give you a backhoe.
— Jason G. Miller, Financial Sorcery: Magical Strategies to Create Real and Lasting Wealth
...maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems--maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.
— Jodi Picoult, Off the Page
I'm sorry you lost the suit,' he said.She shrugged.'At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,' she said...
— James S.A. Corey, Caliban's War
The sun was shut up in a cold bottle.
— Saul Bellow
I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing "just" about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.
— Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale
The familiar song of a night-singing nightingale rises from somewhere in the garden. A nightingale that in this season of cold should not be in the garden, a nightingale that in a thousand verses of Iranian poetry, in the hours of darkness, for the love of a red rose and in sorrow of its separation from it, has forever sung and will forever sing.
— Shahriar Mandanipour, Censoring an Iranian Love Story
He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.
— Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories
My words are like Mummy: butterflies trapped inside a net.
— Holly Bodger, 5 to 1
Love is like a climbing rope. There are little knots along the way, but if you learn off of them, you can get higher than you ever expected.
— A.M.L.
We are not just tickling the dragon’s tail
—  we are timing a flyby through its open jaws while it is yawning.
It was a quiet taunt...a poisoned glass of wine, meant to intoxicate and exsanguinate.
— Renee Ahdieh, The Wrath and the Dawn
Mind you,” said Ponder, “the universe does have a rhythm. Day and night, light and dark, life and death—” “Chicken soup and croutons,” said Ridcully. "Well, not evert metaphor bears close examination".
— Terry Pratchett
He sips his drink and it leaves his handlebar mustache dripping like a cattle dog come outta a river.
— Erin Bowman, Vengeance Road
Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.
— Matthew De Abaitua, If Then
You could not stop the winds and you could not stop Time. It went on and on,-and on.
— Bess Streeter Aldrich
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.
— Brian  Doyle, The Plover
My knee struck a tree root as my vision went black. Suddenly, I was in a building at Haven Crest, kneeling on the floor. Blood, thick and clotted like canned cherries, crept down the walls. The lights above my head flickered off then on with a menacing hum.
— Kady Cross, Sisters of Blood and Spirit
No more kissing beneath bridges?"Her face heated. She turned to go only to have him catch her sleeve. It was a risk, having such long sleeves."Why don't we both stay back here? No one will miss us and you're the most interesting part of the banquet anyway.""Shameless," she scolded.
— Jeannie Lin, The Lotus Palace
His studies were always second to Beatrice. He would've said everything was second to Beatrice but the flowery metaphors and literary devices can only stretch so far and for so many characters.
— Bruce Crown, Chronic Passions
He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every word tacked nine-inches deep into the beams of our minds.
— Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen
The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.
— Matthew De Abaitua, If Then
...All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I'd bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.
— Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase
Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.
— Mary Karr, The Liars' Club
I opened my mouth to tell her that everything would be okay, but the words melted like sugar on my tongue-sweet yet insubstantial.
— Rachel Vincent, The Stars Never Rise
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, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.
— Aristotle
And feast on the dead, I thought with a shudder. As if he could read my thoughts, he pressed a hand to my shoulder. His fingers were long and white, splaying over my arm like a waxen spider. If the gesture was meant to comfort me, it failed.
— Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising
Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
— René Magritte
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.
— Claire Fuller, Our Endless Numbered Days
I'm trying to keep you safe." Safe as a porcelain bowl wrapped in cotton linen and boxed up. It would be a lie to say she didn't want to feel safe, or that Nolan's worry didn't leave her feeling warm and even a bit precious. But it also left her feeling trapped, like an ornamental bird kept in a cage, its wings clipped.
— Page Morgan, The Wondrous and the Wicked
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.
— Christopher Paolini, Inheritance
This jeweled coast does not shine for its gems are coated with grit.
— Bryant A. Loney, To Hear The Ocean Sigh
I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. Like follows as as night the day. Now most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex? I never have to say: "What shall I compare this to?" a summer's day? No. I have to beat the comparisons back into the holes they pour from. Some salt is savory. I live in a sea.
— william gass
If there is anything in writing that comes easy for me it's making up metaphors. They just appear. I can't move two lines without all kinds of images. Then the problem is how to make the best of them. In its geological character, language is almost invariably metaphorical. That's how meanings tend to change. Words become metaphors for other things, then slowly disappear into the new image. I have a hunch, too, that the core of creativity is located in metaphor, in model making, really. A novel is a large metaphor for the world.
— william gass
You know you're about as forthcoming as a mime.
— Shirley Jump, Kissed by Cat
Is there anyone nearby you can speak to without words?”“I don’t know. I only know that there are those whose minds I can speak with that, when I show them how, speak back to my mind as well.
— Tom Larcombe, Merlin's Travels
That one,” Ferox said, pointing at Johann with a claw. “I can see he’s communicated like that before and I think I can speak to his mind. Let me see.”After a moment, Johann broke from the line and approached the dragon.“You did ask me to come closer, didn’t you?” he asked.“Yes, I can speak to this one. He can be my rider.
— Tom Larcombe, Merlin's Travels
Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it's a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove "my friend" before offering to sell him a watch.
— Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
It's not always so easy," she said softly."Why not? It's a part of who you are, isn't it?" he asked with all the sympathy of an asp being prodded with a stick.
— Page Morgan, The Lovely and the Lost
Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!
— Fred Van Lente, Action Philosophers! Giant-Sized Thing, Vol. 1
Speech is the pen and the sword of humankind and it is the foundation of their kingdom. Wherever the flag of speech waves, the most powerful armies are. defeated and scattered. In the arenas in which speech shouts out, the sounds of cannon balls become like the buzzing of bees. from behind the battlements on which the banner of speech has been raised, the sound of its drums are heard. In the precincts where its march reverberates, kings shake in their boots. The Master of Speech smashed to pieces many insurmountable walls, in the face of which Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and many others despaired or retread; and the pen of Speech, imparting and compliance, was saluted and praised.
— M. Fethullah Gülen, Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
…The wonders of life and the universe are mere reflections of microscopic particles engaged in a pointless dance fully choreographed by the laws of physics.
— Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos.
— Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory
The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.
— Thomas Pynchon