Analogy Quotes

“Love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.”
― Ursula LeGuin

“Under the pathologist's microscope, life and death fight in an illuminated circle in a sort of cellular bullfight. The pathologist's job is to find the bull among the matador cells”
― Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal

“Time is like a river made up of the events which hap­pen, and a vi­ol­ent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is car­ried away, and an­other comes in its place, and this will be car­ried away too.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Dunbar

“The words bounced off her like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake.
A stone may skip a long way, but it always sinks eventually.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“I love violent Shakespeare. It is to me what steak is to some people: the bloodier the better.”
― Mara Wilson, Where Am I Now?

“Pure analysis puts at our disposal a multitude of procedures whose infallibility it guarantees; it opens to us a thousand different ways on which we can embark in all confidence; we are assured of meeting there no obstacles; but of all these ways, which will lead us most promptly to our goal? Who shall tell us which to choose? We need a faculty which makes us see the end from afar, and intuition is this faculty. It is necessary to the explorer for choosing his route; it is not less so to the one following his trail who wants to know why he chose it.”
― Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science

“By degrees, the bitterness at my heart diffused itself to the circumference of the circle in which my life went its cheerless mechanical round.”
― Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story

“fleas are like a bad habit—awfully hard to get rid of once you get them”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I was feeling like a rock in a stream with the water passing by me, not fully engaging in life with this heavy burden hanging over me.”
― Lisa Bonavita, Secrets Exposed: When Remaining Silent is No Longer an Option

“Left to our own devices, we are apt to backslide to our instinctive conceptual ways. This underscores the place of education in a scientifically literate democracy, and even suggests a statement of purpose for it (a surprisingly elusive principle in higher education today). The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world. And education is likely to succeed not by trying to implant abstract statements in empty minds but by taking the mental models that are our standard equipment, applying them to new subjects in selective analogies, and assembling them into new and more sophisticated combinations.”
― Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

“The truth in every myth is the pearl in every oyster.”
― J. Earp

“he dragged her like a string of cans behind the wedding car”
― Eoin Colfer, The Arctic Incident

“It's a good plan, Mr. Snicket."

"Oh sure," I said, "like juggling dynamite, or kicking a polar bear.”
― Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?

“Her bare feet whispered across the floor as she approached him with the sort of stealth that only small children and trained killers possess.”
― Obie Williams, The Crimes of Orphans

“He looked at the road white a lot now. Sometimes the white line was solid, sometimes it was broken, and sometimes it was double like streetcar tracks. He wondered how people could ride over this road all the other days of the year and not see the pattern of life and death in that white paint. Or did they see, after all?”
― Stephen King, The Long Walk

“No such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and hence more or less informative.”
― Konrad Lorenz

“The sutras liken reincarnation to the relationship between teachers and students. A singing teacher teaches students how to sing. His students learn techniques and benefit from direct experiential advice from their teacher. But the teacher doesn't remove a song from his throat and insert it into a student's mouth. Similarly, reincarnation is a continuity of everything we have learnt, like lighting one candle from another, or a face and its reflection in a mirror.”
― Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, Not For Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices

“Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in.”
― James S.A. Corey, Cibola Burn

“It will be agreed that you can’t divide a cake up into its component crumbs and say ‘This crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe, this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe’, etc. In this sense it will be agreed that the whole recipe maps onto the whole cake. But now suppose we change one word in the recipe; for instance, suppose ‘baking-powder’ is deleted or is changed to ‘yeast’. We bake 100 cakes according to the new version of the recipe, and 100 cakes according to the old version of the recipe. There is a key difference between the two sets of 100 cakes, and this difference is due to a one-word difference in the recipes. Although there is no one-to-one mapping from word to crumb of cake, there is one-to-one mapping from word difference to whole-cake difference. ‘Baking-powder’ does not correspond to any particular part of the cake: its influence affects the rising, and hence the final shape, of the whole cake. If ‘baking-powder’ is deleted, or replaced by ‘flour’, the cake will not rise. If it is replaced by ‘yeast’, the “cake will rise but it will taste more like bread. There will be a reliable, identifiable difference between cakes baked according to the original version and the ‘mutated’ versions of the recipe, even though there is no particular ‘bit’ of any cake that corresponds to the words in question. This is a good analogy for what happens when a gene mutates.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The idea to write this book hit me like a bad analogy.”
― Special Snowflake, My Safe Space

“Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories.
Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted y the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn't care.
"Mr. President, can I show this to you?" Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. "See, the biggest leavers of jobs--people leaving voluntarily--was from manufacturing."
"I don't get it," Trump said.
Cohn tried to explain: "I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?"
Cohn added, "People don't want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don't want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal ollars, they're going to choose something else."
Trump wasn't buying it.
Severl times Cohn just asked the president, "Why do you have these views?"
"I just do," Trump replied. "I've had these views for 30 years."
"That doesn't mean they're right," Cohn said. "I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn't mean I was right.”
― Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House

“The whole world gets turned upside down by the wish for riches and power. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If wishes were soldiers, then weak men would rule. And if wishes were elixirs, then all men would live forever.”
― P. B. Kerr

“As I look back over China's sixty years under communism, I sense that Mao's Cultural Revolution and Deng's open-door reforms have given China's grassroots two huge opportunities: the first to press for a redistribution of political power and the second to press for a redistribution of economic power.”
― Yu Hua

“She also smokes like a house fire, drinks like a diabetic bulldog, and curses like the ghost of a pirate who has been wandering the afterlife looking for a treasure chest full of fucks that's long ago been emptied”
― Chuck Wendig

“Listen. Even before I found out about you and Devlen, I realized we couldn’t be together. Now brace yourself, I’m going to use a weather analogy.”

I groaned.

He quirked a smile. “You’re all energy and excitement and then you blow away. Being with you is like being on the coast, dancing in the storms. Breathless activity, followed by calm. I have that with my job.” He brushed my hair from my eyes. “After you sacrificed your magic I thought you would be content to stay uninvolved in Sitian affairs and be with me. But you rushed off, jumping right back into the maelstrom. I don’t have the energy to deal with storms on both fronts—pun intended. I need someone steadier.”

Tears ran down my face.

He hugged me. “And I’ll offer to render aid whenever needed because I know you wouldn’t ask. After all, I don’t want to miss out on all the fun.”
― Maria V. Snyder, Spy Glass