Better to be enveloped in a matter that darkly feeds itself with hidden fires

--- Lewis Hyde, in Trickster makes this world (1998), Interlude, p. 90

In context

In the coal fields of West Virginia there are abandoned mines—their entrances long closed, the nearby towns long impoverished—that have caught on fire. These fires are impossible to put out; slowly they burn through the seams of coal, thirty or forty years. How wonderful if the writer of a book should happen on a topic with such longevity! At times he'll wish he'd picked some simpler theme, something he could strip-mine in a season, or something that would flash up and die down in a matter of months so that he could publish and get on. Get on with what, though? Better to be enveloped in a matter that darkly feeds itself with hidden fires; better not to know fully where the veins of fascination lead, but to trust that they will slowly give up their heat in recompense for attention paid.

J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence

--- Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881). Via Dale Hatfield, March 2019. Often translated something like, "I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom"

From Wikiquote:

J'ai toujours préféré la folie des passions à la sagesse de l'indifférence.
I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.
Variant: I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the wisdom of indifference.    
Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, Pt. II, ch. 4, as translated by Lafcadio Hearn (1890) - full text of translation at Project Gutenberg 

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception

--- Neil Postman, from The End of Education (1995), quoted on Rattle's page for the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor

Various web sites list this quote, but without a pin cite; the Amazon Look inside seems to confirm it, but I couldn't view the page (p. 171 given). QuoteFancy.com gives a slightly longer quote: “A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.”

ThoughCo.com offers a few sources for this quote, but neither are from Postman:

Gerard Genette on the Recovery of the Vision
Thus metaphor is not an ornament, but the necessary instrument for a recovery, through style, of the vision of essences, because it is the stylistic equivalent of the psychological experience of involuntary memory, which alone, by bringing together two sensations separated in time, is able to release their common essence through the miracle of an analogy — though metaphor has an added advantage over reminiscence, in that the latter is a fleeting contemplation of eternity, while the former enjoys the permanence of the work of art.
(Gerard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, Columbia University Press, 1981)

I.A. Richards on the Omnipresent Principle of Language
Throughout the history of Rhetoric, metaphor has been treated as a sort of happy extra trick with words, an opportunity to exploit the accidents of their versatility, something in place occasionally but requiring unusual skill and caution. In brief, a grace or ornament or added power of language, not its constitutive form. . . .
That metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language can be shown by mere observation. We cannot get through three sentences of ordinary fluid discourse without it.
(I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Language, 1936)

From the Rattle page:

"Much like George Lakoff and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Postman maintained that words (and words, in truth, are metaphors) are as much the driver of reality as they are the vehicle. . . . For Postman, the study of metaphor was unending and metaphors were as crucial as they were omnipresent; they served to give form to and dictate experience. Is America the great melting pot, or is it an experiment in unity through diversity? What metaphors are embedded in television commercials . . . Put simply, Postman (like his teacher and hero, Marshall McLuhan), maintained that the medium through which information is conveyed directly colors meaning and our sense of the world . . . We are, essentially, what we see, hear, and read. Postman might go so far as to opine that we are the metaphors we use."

This makes me wonder about metaphor shading into myth...

writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun

--- Poet James Valvis, in the biographical statement below his poem The Distracted (2019 winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor) in Rattle  #61, Fall 2018.

Quote in context - the biographical statement:

James Valvis: “I don’t know why I write. Or why I ever started. It feels a bit like asking a penguin why he eats fish. It’s just what penguins do. Still, I’m an unlikely writer, to say the least, a ghetto kid who preferred baseball to Baudelaire, chess to Chesterton, Whitman’s chocolates to Whitman’s poems. I think I simply had too many stories inside not to let some out—and not enough friends to tell them to. I have this theory writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun.” (web)