Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

You only really discover the strength of your spine when your back is against the wall.

The mind revels in conjecture. Where information is lacking, it will gladly fill in the gaps.

Metaphors hide in plain sight, and their influence is largely unconscious. We should mind our metaphors, though, because metaphors make up our minds.

By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.

A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.

Sometimes, you need a door slammed in your face before you can hear opportunity knock.

Heroism often results as a response to extreme events.

Aphorisms are literature's hand luggage. Light and compact, they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain.

Advice is given freely because so much of it is worthless.

In the margin for error lies all our room for maneuver.

I was born when you kissed me. I died when you left me. I lived a few weeks while you loved me.

She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.

He sounds like someone who might best be loved from a distance.

Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.

There are people who make things happen. There are people who watch things happen and then there are people who ask well, what in the heck happened?

E-mails are the cancer of modern business.

sight-seeing gratifies us in different ways. First, there is the pleasure of novelty; secondly, either that of admiration or fault-finding - the latter a very animated enjoyment.

I think it's every artist's nature to want to escape. It's also human nature in a way, depending on your personality, to want to get away from it all.

Everything that is right or reasonable pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'tis time to part.

Don't stop imagining. The day that you do is the day that you die.