Figurative Language Quotes

“How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30)”
― Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones

“I dream the scent
of my mother's lipstick
has come back to haunt me—
like an oil pastel
marking
my dreary, dramatic heart.”
― Analicia Sotelo, Virgin

“…she had a dream, and in that dream Jesus came to her and said, ‘You are from the stars and you came here to heal the world,’ so she made her mom and dad change her name to Starla. I think it’s cosmically perfect, like her, and kind of fitting because her face is covered in a galaxy of freckles.”
― James Brandon, Ziggy, Stardust and Me

“The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gunpoint.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“. . . darkness was staining all the intricate channels of what had once seemed so perfect.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Here memory was simply a cold cloud to be shuddered at.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“I feel I'm living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“She had never been filled with her love like a calm brimming vessel. She had rather suffered it, as a tree might suffer a cold wind, and the image of a coldness was somehow mingled with her memories of marital love.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“The stale September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick—she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up. She was the ugly girl at the ball.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“The dream was strongest of all when Kate's heart was broken. Then she fell asleep as if falling out of life, and the dream became numinous as real things are numinous, vivid even as it blankly slept. She couldn't prove it even to her own satisfaction, but she felt the dream was quickened by love.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“Sweet wine from Spain and gossip from France; the sun in the windows dimmed, sorrowed prettily as the day declined, until the candles' light was mirrored in the glass. Their dabbling flames were like guesses at a feeling, the hearth's fire like the feeling itself. It was a beautiful pastime she had missed; hours that had stepped light-footed on Emilia's memory and passed on.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.”
― Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems

“His sudden decision not to see her any more was utterly incomprehensible to the girl, it was a death sentence from a hidden authority for an unknown crime. Nothing had changed, and then there was suddenly this.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Yet she knew that it was not really the sharp tragic knife of passion that disturbed her now, it was some vaguer nervous storm out of her unsatisfied woman's nature.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value”
― Albert Einstein

“You're walking the edge of a razor blade, Julian, with everything you hide. Believe me, I've walked that razor blade half my life. You get used to it sometimes you forget you're bleeding.”
― Cassandra Clare, Lady Midnight

“She added in a tight, defensive voice that she panicked when she did jobs, it gave her existential panic. She could do them for a while, but it felt like darning socks in a burning building. Time was running out and . . . Did he ever get that?”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“She was a candle in the night, a bright seed of heaven.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“The maidservants all were in love with Southampton, in a rapt, unhoping way, like a tribe of poets in love with the moon; one would have a fit of tears, then it spread to another and another, until all the house heaved with love's calamity.”
― Sandra Newman, The Heavens

“we'll be dark-hinged and planetary
drifting in and out of every season”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“tonight the backyard is brutal
in its twilit emptiness
& I have put my lips
on the glass of his face again
so I won't be lonely
& I have dressed to please him
because it's too quiet here
my hand alive in the cage of his
an actual dandelion in the grass
beside his sandal
the mosquitoes grazing our ankles
we should go inside he says
as the pitchblack comes on again like arsenic
over the glowing lawn”
― Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour

“the heart-shaped digitalis to
unstrange a rhythm raving,
sweet blood and slow blood through
the muscled dark.”
― Marianne Boruch, Cadaver, Speak

“Tongues of Fire

This is what's become of us: I am
confused by mourning, and he is the sun
that goes to sleep on top of me, undone
by moonrise. Lover, all I speak is iambs

and slant rhyme. That devil lamb
of light called hope is sacrificed and none
too pleased with having lost its bleat. The stone
has rolled away but God's not gone and damn

it, I'm no fan of the weather here, it rains
too often, bones of doves and angel down
until the ground stains red with sighs and blood.

It is wet and cold. Will you explain
again the why of all there is and how
he caught me in the act, discovering God?”
― Jill Alexander Essbaum, Heaven

“Her own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weaving
against sundown in a scarlet light.”
― Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

“Ah, how marvellous the days of bachelorhood when I could wander freely among the women like a bee among the flowers.”
― Muhsin Al-Ramli

“Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the Downs.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Figurative Fun by Stewart Stafford

Neigh, neigh, Hyperbole!
Galloping into wild mares' play.
I'd yell, "Egregious slander streaker!"
But it skulks 'neath its nudist speaker.

Understatedness hides in a selfie's rear;
Verbosity hogging limelight sans fear;
Caustic parody, satire, and critique,
Peddling wares in skewed oblique.

Gossip's lip, stained in a bloody hue;
Rumour's half-baked harmonies slew;
Utterances bejewelled speak of love,
Absolutes sting as a duellist's glove.

© 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford