Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

Everyone knows that metaphors are important, yet we have no idea why.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

I am a consummate metaphor addict.

For me, I can't play a metaphor or a symbol.

The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

The thing about metaphors is that, if you give them away, you give away the mystery.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must show it to the understanding in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy with greater dignity; but either of these qualities may be sufficient to recommend it.... That it may be complete, it is required to exhibit, independently of its references, a pleasing image; for a simile is said to be a short episode.

In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In SF, a trope - at least as I understand the usage - is more: science used other than literally.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

I believe in poetic discourse, in the value of speech in a non-naturalistic way; it's speculative.

When an analogy is really singing, it's what you want it to be.

Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc.

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

Metaphors are much more tenacious than facts.

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.