Karen Sullivan > Quotes

“Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.”
― Karen Sullivan, The Complete Illustrated Guide to Natural Home Remedies

“A great ruler, a great court, a great kingdom, these texts suggest never exist unto themselves, as stable, fully actualized entities, and, therefore, are never experienced in their plenitude in the present. Instead, they are always remembered as something that occured in the past or anticipated as something will reoccur in the future. Insofar as they are experienced in the current time, it is only for a brief and evanescent moment, overshadowed by the knowledge that it will soon vanish.
For a realist, the fact that the excellence of a person, a place, or a time is not appreciated in its own time proves that it was never actually as excellent as it seemed.
For a Romantic, however, there exist a people, places, and times whose excellence can only be appreciated Arthur always has to be - to quote the Alliterative Morte Arthure (ca.1400) - "the once and future king”
― Karen Sullivan, The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions

“Conceptual metaphors generally ‘outlive’ the specific words and expressions that involve them.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“Of course, the ‘living/dead’ nomenclature is itself a metaphor, in that it personifies metaphors as living beings that can ‘live’ and ‘die’. Like all metaphors, this personification metaphor is helpful in some ways but imperfect in others. It is useful because it allows us to think about ‘living’ metaphors as having some of the traits of living beings. That is, ‘living’ metaphors can be thought of as active, having effects, and able to cause changes. The personification metaphor also lets us effortlessly reason that ‘dead’ metaphors will not have effects or instigate changes. Nonetheless, in other respects the metaphor misrepresents the actual situation, because metaphors can be partly dead and partly alive.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“The ‘death’ of a metaphor is the loss of a connection between a metaphor and a specific word, not the loss of the conceptual metaphor itself. ‘Dead’ metaphors are words and phrases that were previously metaphoric, not conceptual metaphors that have disappeared. Conceptual metaphors generally ‘outlive’ the specific words and expressions that involve them.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“The fact that metaphors can sleep and wake is both bad news and good news for speakers and writers who want to avoid mixed metaphors. The bad news is that when a metaphoric word or phrase is sleeping for us, we probably won’t notice if we use the word or phrase in ways that are inconsistent with its source-domain meaning.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“On questions relating to the human condition, no single metaphor has all the answers.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“...all humans are given the same set of primary-metaphor building blocks, but different language and cultural groups put the blocks together in different ways. Some individuals even force the blocks together in ways that don’t fit – which is the major reason we get mixed metaphors.”
― karen sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“In general, the specific words in metaphoric language are less important than the concepts that the metaphors are comparing. Critics often pay attention to metaphoric words instead of concepts, simply because words are easier to identify. It’s straightforward to decide that a metaphor includes the word like and therefore is a simile. It’s harder to pinpoint what’s wrong with lightning that pirouettes or what’s interesting about a window that resembles an eye.”
― Karen Sullivan

“If we know how metaphors work on a conceptual level, we can control their effects. We can avoid using metaphors that are confusing or distracting, and we can design metaphors that do exactly what we want. When we encounter metaphoric language, we can analyse what makes it effective or not. We can avoid being manipulated by subconscious metaphors, and we can accept the benefits of a metaphor while rejecting any aspects we find unhelpful or inaccurate.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“Whether metaphors are strung together like separate beads on a string, or kneaded together into a compound, it’s important that we can use more than one of them.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“Mixed metaphors with two source domains that don’t make sense together, […] are the structures that most deserve the name ‘mixed metaphors’.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“Image metaphors have probably had a disproportionate effect on opinions about metaphor because they are so noticeable and memorable. Conceptual metaphors, in contrast, are subtle and subconscious. When we use image metaphors, we often try to design one that’s novel and interesting. When we use a conceptual metaphor, we usually don’t even know that we’re doing it. As a result, conceptual metaphors have, until recently, received less attention from researchers and critics, and have had relatively little influence on popular and critical views of metaphor overall.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse