“A lot of metaphor must be in the beholder’s eye. My kind of mind is so used to ‘seeing double’ that it finds unwelcome subtexts in an instruction manual…A psychiatrist friend calls the creative temperament Janusian—after Janus, whose nature is to look both ways. I thought everybody was like that but he said no, that for him, the implications of phrases like a ‘dark white’ or a ‘burning cold’—which are mother’s milk to me—left him feeling, you know, seasick…”

James Merrill

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“Even the hardest of the sciences depend on a foundation of metaphors. To be aware of metaphors is to be humbled by the complexity of the world, to realize that deep in the undercurrents of thought there are thousands of lenses popping up between us and the world, and that we’re surrounded at all times by what Steven Pinker of Harvard once called ‘pedestrian poetry.'” 

David Brooks

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“Bad metaphors make for bad policy.”

Paul Krugman

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“The one thing that’s a bit of a drag is the hyper-dominance of Facebook and Twitter, [which] feels really monolithic and dull to me. I don’t like the way they look, I don’t like the way they feel. I feel like they’re huge Soviet apartment blocks that we’ve all been forced to live in. And if you want to really reach a lot of people, you bloody well better get yourself an apartment there. But it’s going to look like everyone else’s apartment, and you’re going to have to communicate through their Soviet centralised communication system. I don’t even think the metaphor is a bad one; because everyone is watching. Certainly the advertisers are watching. That’s why these entities are so valuable.”

Jennifer Egan

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