Download figurative language

Terminology Identification – List One
1. Affliction then is ours; / We are the trees whom shaking fastens more. (George Herbert, The Temple)
2. Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. (Richard Cushing)
3. The pen is mightier than the sword. (Edward Butler-Lytton, Richelieu)
4. War is not healthy for children and other living things. (Vietnam War era poster)
5. Oh books, who alone are liberal and free, who give all who ask of you and enfranchise all who serve you
faithfully! (Richard de Bury, Philobiblon)
6. He was now sufficiently composed to order a funeral of modest magnificence, suitable at once to the rank of
Nouradin’s profession and the reputation of his wealth. (Samuel Johnson in The Rambler)
7. For answers successfully arrived at are solutions to difficulties previously discussed, and one cannot untie a knot if
he is ignorant of it. (Aristotle)
8. My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun… (Shakespeare, “Sonnet 130”)
9. I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. (Robert Frost, “The Road Less Travelled”)
10. Alexander Pope once wrote that a literary critic of his time would “damn him with a faint praise.”
11. Let us go then, you and I / while the evening is spread out against the sky / like a patient etherized upon a table.
(T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufruck”)
12. One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.
13. Men say they love virtue, but they leave her standing in the rain. (Juvenal)
14. Great minds think alike.
15. Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel, which smoked with bloody execution. (Shakespeare, Macbeth)
16. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. (Churchill)
17. My life closed twice before its close… (Emily Dickenson, “Parting”)
18. I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence… (Robert Frost, “The Road Less Travelled”)
19. Why does a boy who’s fast as a jet / Take all day – and sometimes two – / To get to school? (John Ciardi, “Speed
Adjustments”)
20. Only the champion daisy trees were serene. After all, they were part of a rain forest already two thousand years old
and scheduled for eternity, so they ignored the men and continued to rock the diamondbacks that slept in their
arms. It took the river to persuade them that indeed the world was altered. - Toni Morrison, “Tar Baby”
21. Slavery is a living death. (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
22. He that voluntarily continues ignorance is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces, as to him that should
extinguish the tapers of a lighthouse might justly be imputed the calamities of shipwrecks. (Samuel Johnson)
23. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand / Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch'd: (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
24. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. (George Orwell, Animal Farm)
25. [I] therefore determined to gratify my predominant desire, and by drinking at the fountains of knowledge, to
quench the thirst of curiosity. (Samuel Johnson)
26. With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb’st the skies! (Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella)
27. God has given such brave soldiers to this Crown that, if they do not frighten our neighbours, at least they prevent
us from being frightened by them. (Queen Elizabeth I)
28. The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, / With loads of learned lumber in his head… (Alexander Pope, “An Essay
on Criticism”)
29. Thus a mind that is free from passion is a very citadel; man has no stronger fortress in which to seek shelter and
defy every assault. Failure to perceive this is ignorance; but to perceive it, and still not seek its refuge, is
misfortune indeed. (Marcus Aurelius)
30. Wisdom cries aloud in the streets; in the markets she raises her voice… (Proverb 1:20)
31. As wax melts before the fire, / May the wicked perish before God. (Psalm 68: 2b)
32. A major lesson Americans need to learn is that life consists of more than cars and television sets.
33. Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. (Shakespeare, Macbeth)
34. What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young. (George Bernard Shaw)
35. It is a maxim among these lawyers that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again; and therefore
they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of
mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions;
and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly. (Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)
36. I should have been a pair of ragged claws, / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock”)
37. My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow; / An hundred years should got to praise /
Thine eyes and on thine forehead gaze; / Two hundred to adore each breast, / But thirty thousand to the rest.
(Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”)
38. O solitude! Where are the charms / That sages have seen in thy face? (William Cowper)
39. They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion; / …They will be like a well-watered garden, / And they
will sorrow no more. (Jeremiah 31:12)
40. “We had to destroy a village to save it.” (U.S. military officer during Vietnam War)