60 Best Metaphor Examples
October 1, 2024
Before we get to our 60 metaphor examples, a metaphor is a figure of speech and a form of figurative language in which one thing is said to be another thing, which it cannot be. A metaphor, while figurative, makes use of the idea of imagery, telling the reader that one thing literally is another—even though we know that is not true.
This is different from a simile, which uses the words “like” or “as” to draw a comparison between two things.
For example:
- Metaphor: Love is a winding road.
- Simile: Love is like a winding road.
- Metaphor: I’m an open book.
- Simile: I’m as open as a book.
- Metaphor: Forrest Gump had said that life was mysterious, a box of chocolates.
- Simile: “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.” –Forrest Gump
See how we’re using almost exactly the same words, but the image that we’re left with is just slightly different? Well, when you’re writing, you can employ metaphors (and similes) to create specific images in the minds of your readers—and help them to understand an idea in a completely new way.
Why use metaphors?
When you’re looking at the world around you, sometimes you’ll have a thought or a feeling that seems almost impossible to describe. You won’t be able to find the exact right words for what you’ve experienced, so you’ll search around your brain for associations that help that experience make sense. Associations are the connections we make in our brains between different concepts. The connections help us create order and coherence in what might otherwise be an unyieldingly chaotic world.
For example: “That roller coaster was such a rush! I feel like I got shoved out of an airplane!”
Now, you wouldn’t actually need to have gone skydiving to make this comparison (a simile, by the way). Your friends and family would understand immediately what you meant. If the advertising team for your city’s favorite amusement park wanted to use your simile to write a metaphor for an ad for their rollercoaster, they might write something like: “Come on out and try the Screaming Eagle! It’s a skydiving rush of a good time!”
See the difference again? The metaphor says that the Screaming Eagle is a skydiving rush. It’s not like a skydiving rush. The metaphor simply brings the two ideas closer together—and forces one idea to literally stand in for the other.
The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, “Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.” We use metaphors to force ideas and objects into collision that wouldn’t otherwise meet. And, in this way, we can see the world around us in new, non-cliché ways.
Metaphors can create sticky situations
Because metaphors seem to literally define one thing to another, unrelated thing, we can create situations of confusion if we’re not careful.
The famous anthropologist Joseph Campbell once wrote, “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result, we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.”
In other words, when we get far away from the intentions of an artist, writer, or culture, we might fail to understand when they intended to use figurative or literal language. And this “double-edged sword” capacity that the metaphor contains can have far-reaching implications—as Campbell asserts about the nature of religious belief in the modern world. Isn’t that fascinating?
Anyway, this is likely something you won’t ever need to worry about. But, if you’re thinking about writing and the power of language, it’s always interesting to remember that the things we write, say, and think are powerful, and that language can mean many things to many people.
In that vein, here are 60 examples of metaphors from both literature and popular music to help you better understand what metaphors look like—and how you can write them yourself. You can see, even from this list, that it might be easy to interpret one metaphor in many different ways. Have fun enjoying the complexity—and good luck writing your own.
Examples of metaphors from literature
1) “Rose is a rose is a rose.” –Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily”
2) “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.” –Joan Didion, “The Year of Magical Thinking”
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4) “The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.” –Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
5) “Books are the mirrors of the soul.” –Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts
6) “Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.” Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
7) “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” –Karl Marx
Examples of Metaphors (Continued)
8) “Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.” –Matt Groenig, The Big Book of Hell
9) “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” –Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
10) “‘Life,’ wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’” –E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
11) “It’s just like when you’ve got some coffee that’s too black, which means it’s too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won’t even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.” –Malcolm X
12) “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.” –Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
13) “Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.” –Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
Examples of Metaphors (Continued)
14) “Time is a river…and books are boats. Many volumes start down that stream, only to be wrecked and lost beyond recall in its sands. Only a few, a very few, endure the testings of time and live to bless the ages following.” –R.W. and Rev. Joseph Fort Newton, The Lost Symbol
15) “You’re a marshmallow. Soft and sweet and when you get heated up you go all gooey and delicious.” –Janet Evanovich, One for the Money
16) “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” –Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
17) “Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.” –Andrew Davidson, The Gargoyle
18) “Every word was a singing sparrow, a magic trick, a truffle for me. The words made me laugh in delight.” –Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
19) “We all grow tired eventually; it happens to everyone. Even the sun, at the close of the year, is no longer a morning person.” –Joyce Rachelle
List Continued
20) “Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one’s lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut.” –Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
21) “That cloak of love you were wearing—he’s torn it to shreds, undoing the seams of trust that held it together. How can you ever wear those shreds?” –Antonia Michaelis, The Storyteller
22) “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.” –Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
23) “Oh, love is a journey with water and stars, with drowning air and storms of flour: love is a clash of lightnings, two bodies subdued by one honey.” –Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets
24) “We cannot be too cautious, Hannelore. Just because someone knocks on the door doesn’t mean you have to open it. Sometimes, sweet girl, there are wolves at the door. If we are not careful, they might eat us.” –Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
Metaphor Examples (Continued)
25) “The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.” –Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
26) “They are talking about how we can’t trust the faded women, women who can’t be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow.” –Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
27) “Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows.” –Aimee Bender, Willful Creatures
28) “Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown.” –Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
29) “The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning.” –Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies
30) “She was lost now, she’d been silenced—another dead branch on Cordova’s warped tree.” –Marisha Pessl, Night Film
Examples of metaphor from popular music
31) “And she’s climbing the stairway to heaven.” –Led Zeppelin
32) “This girl is on fire.” –Alicia Keys
33) “Illusion never changed into something real. I’m wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn. You’re a little late. I’m already torn.” –Natalie Imbruglia
34) “Life is a highway, I wanna ride it all night long.” –Tom Cochrane
35) “I’m on tonight—you know my hips don’t lie.” –Shakira
36) “Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey.” –Seal
List Continued
37) “Mirrors on the ceiling, the pink champagne on ice. And she said, ‘We are all just prisoners here of our own device.’ And in the master’s chambers, they gathered for the feast. They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast.” –The Eagles
38) “It’s another tequila sunrise, starin’ slowly ‘cross the sky.” –The Eagles
39) “And afterall, you’re my wonderwall.” –Oasis
40) “Peace and blessings manifest with every lesson learned. If your knowledge were your wealth, then it would be well-earned.” –Erykah Badu
41) “Last dance with Mary Jane, one more time to kill the pain. I feel summer creepin’ in and I’m tired of this town again.” –Tom Petty
42) “Money trees is the perfect place for shade, and that’s jus’ how I feel.” –Kendrick Lamar
43) “‘Cause baby you’re a firework.” –Katy Perry
Metaphor Examples (Continued)
44) “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” –Big Mama Thornton
45) “And the landslide will bring you down.” –Fleetwood Mac
46) “Every rose has its thorn, just like every night has its dawn.” –Poison
47) “This time, baby, I’ll be bulletproof.” –La Roux
48) “When the sun shines, we’ll shine together. Told you I’ll be here forever. Said I’ll always be your friend. Took an oath, I’ma stick it out to the end. Now that it’s raining more than ever. Know that we’ll still have each other. You can stand under my umbrella.” –Rihanna
49) “You shoot me down, but I won’t fall. I am titanium.” –David Guetta
50) “We all live in a yellow submarine.” –The Beatles
51) “And I have to speculate that God Himself did make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces from the clay.” –The Postal Service
52) “Say you can’t sleep baby, I know. That’s that me espresso.” –Sabrina Carpenter
53) “Someday you will find me caught beneath the landslide, in a champagne supernova in the sky.” –Oasis
54) “Baby, why don’t you come over? Red wine supernova, fall right into me.” –Chappell Roan
List Continued
55) “Islands in the stream, that is what we are.” –Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers
56) “Don’t go chasin’ waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.” –TLC
57) “Yesterday is gone and you will be OK. Place your past into a book. Burn the pages, let ’em cook.” –Sia
58) “We’re goin’ off the rails on a crazy train.” –Ozzy Osbourne
59) “‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life.” –The Verve
60) “When I say heart I mean finish. The last one there is a potato knish. Baking too long in the sun of spud infinity.” –Big Thief
Additional Resources
