26 Quotes About Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is unavoidable, I am finding, in writing about gardening: weeds don't just grow, they grow with intent, they grow aggressively. Well, they do, as any gardener knows. They sneak in and swarm up when your back is turned.

The river loved to tell everybody (everybody being the sky, the wind, the few trees that grew around there, birds, deer and even the stars if you can believe that) what a great river it was. "I come roaring from the earth and return roaring to the earth. I am the master of my waters. I am the mother and father of myself. I don't need a single drop of rain. Look at my smooth strong white muscles. I am my own future!

They went down to the stream. It was all bearded with dirty grasses and was grumbling, for the rains had filled it with water. So it complained. It complained of being too fat. It was never satisfied. In summer it spent its time moaning that it was going to die, and then...Streams were always like that.

A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed. 'Hobbits!' he thought. 'Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There's something mighty queer behind this.' He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

The hippopotamus is said to have a tender heart by those who have eaten that delicacy baked, so a thick skin is not necessarily a reliable index to what is inside the man.

A cat probably doesn't say to himself, 'Where did I go wrong? Why wasn't I able to get my idea across?' More likely, Leo's brain reacted very much like the human brain in such a situation, and he thought, 'That damned stupid human. He's too dumb to understand what I was trying to say.

Of the sciences today, quantum physics alone seems to have found its way back to an equitable relationship with metaphors, those fundamental tools of the imagination. The other sciences are occasionally so bound by rational analysis, or so wary of metaphor, that they recognize and denounce anthropomorphism as a kind of intellectual cancer, instead of employing it as a tool of comparative inquiry, which is perhaps the only way the mind works, that parallelism we finally call narrative.