I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like (15 page)

QUENTIN CRISP

The woman who too easily and ardently yielded her devotion
will find that its vitality, like a bright fire, soon consumes itself.

ANTOINE DE RIVAROL

A quarrel between friends, when made up,
adds a new tie to friendship, as experience shows that
the callosity formed round a broken bone makes it stronger than before.

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES

Callosity
means “the condition of being callused” and refers to the hardened tissue that develops around a fractured bone as it heals. Wallace Stegner made the same point about broken hearts: “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”

 

Once a woman has forgiven her man,
she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.

MARLENE DIETRICH

Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.

ISAAC D'ISRAELI

This observation, which is commonly misattributed to Benjamin Disraeli, comes from
Curiosities of Literature
, a six-volume study of history and literature by one of England's foremost historians and critics (and also the father of Benjamin Disraeli). Here are two other metaphorical observations on the same subject:

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze.”
Elinor Glyn

“Romance, like alcohol, should be enjoyed, but should not be allowed to become necessary.”
Edgar Z. Friedenberg

 

A woman who has known but one man
is like a person who has heard only one composer.

ISADORA DUNCAN

Relationships are hard. It's like a full-time job, and we should treat it like one.
If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you,
they should give you two weeks' notice.
There should be severance pay, and before they leave you,
they should have to find you a temp.

BOB ETTINGER

A man has every season,
while a woman has only the right to spring.

JANE FONDA

Men are like pay phones.
Some of them take your money. Most of them don't work,
and when you find one that does, someone else is on it.

CATHERINE FRANCO

A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union.
He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Your friend is your needs answered.
He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

KAHLIL GIBRAN

The man who discovers a woman's weakness
is like the huntsman in the heat of the day who finds a cool spring.
He wallows in it.

JEAN GIRAUDOUX

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another,
are necessary to the life of the affections, as leaves are to the life of a tree.
If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

He was a baked potato—solid…
I was a fancy dessert—mocha chip ice cream.

KATHARINE HEPBURN,
comparing herself with Spencer Tracy

A woman…should be like a good suspense movie.
The more left to the imagination, the more excitement there is.
This should be her aim—to create suspense.

ALFRED HITCHCOCK

The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon,
but its echo lasts a great deal longer.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.

Another spectacular kiss metaphor came in a 1955 observation from Jeanne Bourgeois, the French singer and dancer better known as Mistinguette: “A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling every woman ought to know.”

 

A man…should keep his friendship in constant repair.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact
of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

CARL JUNG

Everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.

JOHN KEATS,
on Fanny Brawne, after being spurned

When you get back together with an old boyfriend, it's pathetic.
It's like having a garage sale and buying your own stuff back.

LAURA KIGHTLINGER

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes;
there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.

HENRY KISSINGER

Kissinger may have been inspired by a famous seventeenth-century line from George Savile (Lord Halifax): “Love is a passion that hath friends in the garrison.” In a 1970
Esquire
article, Sally Kempton looked at the same phenomenon from the other side of the gender gap: “It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”

 

The relation of man to woman is the flowing of two rivers side by side,
sometimes mingling, then separating again, and traveling on.

D. H. LAWRENCE

Absence lessens the minor passions and increases the great ones,
as the wind douses a candle and kindles a fire.

FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

This was La Rochefoucauld's attempt to settle the debate between those who believe “absence makes the heart grow fonder” or “out of sight, out of mind.”

 

Men kick friendship around like a football,
but it doesn't seem to crack.
Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.

ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH

Life without a friend is death without a witness.

ROSE MACAULAY

On the wall of our life together hung a gun
waiting to be fired in the final act.

MARY MCCARTHY

McCarthy wrote this about her relationship with
Partisan Review
editor Philip Rahv in her 1992 book
Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–38.
De
spite the title, the book is less about her intellectual development than about her sexual adventures.

 

The worldly relations of men and women often form an equation
that cancels out without warning
when some insignificant factor has been added to either side.

WILLIAM MCFEE

If dating is like shopping,
being engaged is like having a guy put you on lay-a-way.
Like saying, “I know I want it.
I just want to delay taking it home as long as possible.”

KRIS MCGAHA

No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny
without leaving some mark on it forever.

FRANÇOIS MAURIAC

Women's hearts are like old china, none the worse for a break or two.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

The allurement that women hold out to men
is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors:
they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

H. L. MENCKEN

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands.

H. L. MENCKEN

Finding a man is like finding a job;
it's easier to find one when you already have one.

PAIGE MITCHELL

A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.

MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve
that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

G. K. Chesterton, without formally mentioning beauty, said pretty much the same thing: “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”

 

The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms.
Everything is more beautiful when they have passed.

SUZANNE NECKER

There are two things a real man likes—danger and play;
and he likes women because she is
the most dangerous of playthings.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

A home-made friend wears longer than one you buy in the market.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Never date a woman you can hear ticking.

MARK PATINKIN

This observation, from a
Providence Journal
columnist, is one of the best things ever written on one the most popular metaphors of our time:
the biological time clock.

 

A woman is a foreign land,
Of which, though there he settle young,

A man will ne'er quite understand
The customs, politics, and tongue.

COVENTRY PATMORE

Women are like dreams—
they are never the way you would like to have them.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

MARCEL PROUST

Giving a man space is like giving a dog a computer:
the chances are he will not use it wisely.

BETTE-JANE RAPHAEL

A man's heart may have a secret sanctuary where only one woman may enter,
but it is full of little anterooms which are seldom vacant.

HELEN ROWLAND,
on men's tendency to stray

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets—
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away.

MAY SARTON

Though friendship is not quick to burn,
It is explosive stuff.

MAY SARTON

That common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment.

RICHARD SCHICKEL

Breaking up is like knocking over a coke machine.
You can't do it in one push.
You've gotta rock it back and forth a few times, and then it goes over.

JERRY SEINFELD

What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night?

JERRY SEINFELD

Seinfeld added: “The only difference is that in not many job interviews is there a chance you'll wind up naked.” Comedian Eddie Murphy put it more coarsely, but his metaphor enjoys great popularity among college boys and young adult men: “When you're dating, you're just leasing the pussy with an option to buy.”

 

It is assumed that the woman must wait,
motionless, until she is wooed.
That is how the spider waits for the fly.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Dating is a lot like sports.
You have to practice; you work out; you study the greats.
You hope to make the team, and it hurts to be cut.

SINBAD

The game women play is men.

ADAM SMITH

Going out with a jerky guy
is kind of like having a piece of food caught in your teeth.
All your friends notice it before you do.

LIVIA SQUIRES

Glances are the heavy artillery of the flirt:
everything can be conveyed in a look,
yet that look can always be denied,
for it cannot be quoted word for word.

STENDHAL
(pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle)

Some looks, however, cannot be denied. One was famously described by the French writer known as Colette: “When she raises her eyelids, it's as if she were taking off all her clothes.”

 

The great majority of men, especially in France,
both desire and possess a fashionable woman,
much in the way one might own a fine horse—
as a luxury befitting a young man.

STENDHAL
(pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle)

Man is the hunter; woman is his game.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Friends do not live in harmony, merely, as some say, but in melody.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Indeed, we do not really live unless we have friends surrounding us
like a firm wall against the winds of the world.

CHARLES HANSON TOWNE

Talking with a man is like trying to saddle a cow.
You work like hell, but what's the point?

GLADYS UPHAM

The first time you buy a house you think how pretty it is and sign the check.
The second time you look to see if the basement has termites.
It's the same with men.

LUPE VÉLEZ

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few,
and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
True friendship is a plant of slow growth
and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity
before it is entitled to the appellation.

GEORGE WASHINGTON

This comes from a 1783 letter. You may be more familiar with another plant metaphor from Washington: “Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth.” Also on the roots theme, George Eliot wrote in
Daniel Deronda
(1874): “Friendships begin with liking or gratitude—roots that can be pulled up.”

 

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

HENRY WINKLER

This is a fabulous metaphor from an unexpected source, perfectly describing how assumptions can slowly eat away at the foundation of a relationship. Winkler inserted the line in the middle of a 1995 commencement address he gave at his alma mater, Emerson College in Boston.