Literary Metaphor Quotes

Pu La's writing is multi-layered, multi-faceted, and deep.

Time is a river, and books are boats.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a mentor, a teacher, a guidepost, a counsellor.

For me, what I am making in the novel is a place to live. When I first switched from poetry to novels, I was asked why, and the metaphor I came up with was about poems as rooms. You can make a room perfect, but then you have to shut the door and never go back, whereas a novel is like a house - it can never be perfect, but you can make a life in it.

London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

English literature is a flying fish.

In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past. I don't believe in them in the traditional sense.

My stuff is direct. Critics have compared my writing style with boxing all the way back to 1978 when my first book of essays appeared: it was compared to Muhammad Ali's style.

Back in the 1980s, state-of-the-nation fictions were all set in Manhattan. Now, they're all in Trump country. Early in 'S-Town,' we're introduced to an actual maze, every branch of which leads to a further junction. This may also be a metaphor.

A library is but the soul's burying ground. It is a land of shadows.

Women are books, and men the readers be.

A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge.

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

A book is a garden; A book is an orchard; A book is a storehouse; A book is a party. It is company by the way; it is a counselor; it is a multitude of counselors.

We are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding.