I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like Read Online Free Page B

reinforcement and re-inspiration.
    As my reading program progressed, I continued this simple recording ritual. After a few months, my dingy little basement room came alive, looking almost as if it had been plastered with a special kind of quotation wallpaper. Thoreau was well represented on my Wall of Quotes:
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    We are all sculptors and painters,
and our material is our own flesh and bones.
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    Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you,
opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
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    As was Ralph Waldo Emerson:
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    Hitch your wagon to a star.
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    The profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine,
until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes it.
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    and Albert Camus:
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    There is no sun without shadow,
and it is essential to know the night.
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    In the depth of winter, I finally learned that
within me there lay an invincible summer.
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    As much as any quotation on my wall, this last observation from Camusdescribed what had been happening to me. My investment in a reflective reading program was paying unexpectedly large—and largely unexpected—dividends. A few months earlier, I was in the depths of a dark winter. Now, however, I was beginning to break through to a deeper level of understanding about myself and what I needed to do with my life.
    Years later, I would come across an observation that captured what I had been experiencing. In a 1904 letter to a friend, Franz Kafka asked a provocative rhetorical—and metaphorical—question: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” And then he answered the question this way:
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    A book should serve as an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.
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    For the remainder of my college years, I read voraciously. My grades suffered, as did many personal relationships, but I was self-medicating with a drug that appeared to hold great promise. Unlike the street drugs that were beginning to become popular, the substance I was using was legal, free for the taking, and capable of unrivaled mind-expanding effects. Another metaphorical observation, this one from Rudyard Kipling—and also discovered many years later—expressed it perfectly:
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    Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
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    It’s now been more than four decades since I graduated from college, and I’m still addicted—although these days I simply describe myself as an avid quotation collector. In the same way other people collect coins, or stamps, or butterflies, I collect quotations. It is a passion that will continue for the remainder of my life.
    At the end of my college years, I dismantled my Wall of Quotes and secured them in a manila folder that I labeled Words to Live By . As the years passed, the folder became so bloated with new discoveries that I had to use large rubber bands to keep everything together. After a decade or so, thefolder and its contents became so tattered and worn that I transferred all the quotations into a computer file designated by the initials WTLB . Since then, my regimen has been pretty much the same. Whenever I find a particularly inspiring quotation in a book or article, I make a notation in the margin. Later, when I’ve finished the reading, I record those observations in the WTLB file on my computer.
    All the specimens in my Words to Live By file have inspired or challenged me in some important way. And while many of the quotations are examples of other favorite literary devices—like chiasmus and paradox—a significant number of them, just like the quotations that have appeared so far in this chapter, are analogies, metaphors, and similes. In the remainder of the chapter, I’ve selected many more that have helped me become a better person; perhaps they will be of some benefit to you as well.
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    I don’t want to get to the end of my life
and find that I have lived