“Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.”
Source: Selected Poems
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Osip Mandelstam5
Russian poet and essayist 1891–1938Related quotes
“The earth cracks and
is shriveled up;
the wind moans piteously;
the sky goes out
if you should fail.”
William Carlos Williams book Al Que Quiere!
"Chicory and Daisies"
Al Que Quiere! (1917)
George Orwell book Politics and the English Language
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Context: Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
“Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.”
Giannina Braschi book United States of Banana
United States of Banana (2011)
“I don’t want to be a simile anymore, I want to be a metaphor.”
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 24 (p. 296)
Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …
Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 298
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher
from Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.
Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) American anarchist writer and feminist
And Thou Too (1888)
Context: Ay, gather your petals and take them back
To the dead heart under the dew;
And crown it again with the red love bloom,
For the dead are always true. But go not "back to the sediment"
In the slime of the moaning sea,
For a better world belongs to you,
And a better friend to me.