“Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 4
Context: Since movement is a metaphor for change, the best thing will be to say: nonchange is (always) change. It would appear that I have finally arrived at the desired disequilibrium. Nonetheless, change is not the primordial, original word that I am searching for: it is a form of becoming. When becoming is substituted for change, the relation between the two terms is altered, so that I am obliged to replace nonchange by permanence, which is a metaphor for fixity, as becoming is for coming-to-be, which in turn is a metaphor for time in all its ceaseless transformations…. There is no beginning, no original word: each one is a metaphor for another word which is a metaphor for yet another, and so on. All of them are translations of translations. A transparency in which the obverse is the reverse: fixity is always momentary.
I begin all over again: if it does not make sense to say that fixity is always momentary, the same may not be true if I say that it never is.

We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct. <br class="br">&quot; Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html&quot;, speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931) <br class="br">General sources

United States of Banana (2011)

Syncopations
A Guide to Men (1922)

Source: La Vita Nuova (1293), Chapter I, opening lines (as reported in The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time by Leslie Pockell)

Source: The Land That Time Forgot (1918), Chapter 4

Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)
Context: The love of man and woman is the beginning of the love of God. You can realise God within like many men have done. It's one of the rarest things on earth to realise God, but everybody seems to think that that's the end. Where I come from, realising God was the easy part of it. That God of love which is already here anyway - who wouldn't be able to realise it? The difficult part is to bring that God into this world where God or love is not, into that body listening to these words and this body speaking them. That's the task.

pg 10
Variant: Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight