“Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.”
United States of Banana (2011)
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Giannina Braschi 37
Puerto Rican writer 1953Related quotes
“I don’t want to be a simile anymore, I want to be a metaphor.”
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter 24 (p. 296)
"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.
“Our health care system is the envy of the world.”
3rd Presidential Debate http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004d.html (October 13, 2004).
2000s, 2004
“The UN system is not very democratic, everyone knows that the Security Council is not democratic.”
UN expert on democracy highlights importance of free expression, information http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=46355&Cr=information&Cr1=#.Um9rdr_3DjA
2013
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.
" Education by Poetry http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html", speech delivered at Amherst College and subsequently revised for publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931)
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