Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he's seeing me for the last time. “’I am a shark, Cassie,’ he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. But she had been blinded by exactly the same invisibility-of-the-mind, and was only just realizing it.” ― The Lie Tree, Frances Hardingeħ. Faith herself had used it to good effect, hiding in plain sight and living a double life. Women and girls were so often unseen, forgotten, afterthoughts. ‘Invisible,’ said Faith under her breath. “Who had they been, all these mothers and sisters and wives? What were they now? Moons, blank and faceless, gleaming with borrowed light, each spinning loyally around a bigger sphere. “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!” - Romeo & Juliet, William ShakespeareĦ. Writers frequently turn to metaphors to describe people in unexpected ways:ĥ. The time had come to step back, leave the main tent, go buy some popcorn and a Coke, bliss out, cool down.” - Seize the Night, Dean Koontz Currently I was in ring two hundred and ninety-nine, with elephants dancing and clowns cart wheeling and tigers leaping through rings of fire. “Bobby Holloway says my imagination is a three-hundred-ring circus.
“The sun in the west was a drop of burning gold that slid near and nearer the sill of the world.” - Lord of the Flies, William GoldingĤ. “But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.” ― Rabbit, Run, John Updikeģ. “Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.” ― If Then, Matthew De AbaituaĢ. Metaphors can make prose more muscular or imagery more vivid:ġ. Given the amount of nuance that goes into it, a metaphor example in a text can sometimes deserve as much interpretation as the text itself. Other times, a metaphor might explain a phenomenon. Writers use literary metaphors to evoke an emotional response or paint a vivid picture. Metaphors in literature are drops of water: as essential as they are ubiquitous.
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Feel free to skip to your section of interest below for metaphor examples. Metaphors penetrate the entire spectrum of our existence - so we turned to many mediums to dig them up, from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to the Backstreet Boys’ ancient discography. The Ultimate List of 90+ Metaphor Examples The best way to understand how a metaphor can be used is to see it in practice - luckily, we’ve got a bucket-load of metaphor examples handy for you to peruse. But if you say, “Life is a highway,” you’re putting a metaphor in motion. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” for instance, is a simile. Unlike metaphors, similes use like and as to directly create the comparison. Simile and metaphor are both figures of speech that draw resemblances between two things. How does a metaphor differ from a simile? Rather, these are all instances of metaphors in action. Another spoiler alert: no, Katy Perry doesn't literally think that you're a firework. As much as you might like to greet your significant other with a warhammer in hand (“love is a battlefield”) or bring 50 tanks of gasoline every time you go on a date (“love is a journey”), that’s not likely to happen in reality. Note that metaphors are always non-literal.
To give you a starting point, here are some examples of common metaphors: It can also be a rhetorical device that specifically appeals to our sensibilities as readers. Through this method of equation, metaphors can help explain concepts and ideas by colorfully linking the unknown to the known the abstract to the concrete the incomprehensible to the comprehensible. It does this by stating that Thing A is Thing B. A metaphor is a literary device that imaginatively draws a comparison between two unlike things.