"Metaphor is the shame of literature; it is the shame of everything... That’s why linguists are so interested in it. It is by nature a sensory-motor evasion when you longer know what to do. It gives us something to say, eh?"
Deleuze, Cinema, Truth and Time: the Falsifier
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-09-3/
"There is no "like" here, we are not saying "like an electron," "like an interaction," etc. The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real. These are electrons in person, veritable black holes, actual organites, authentic sign sequences. It's just that they have been uprooted from their strata, destratified, decoded, deterritorialized, and that is what makes their proximity and interpenetration in the plane of consistency possible. A silent dance."
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, The Geology of Morals
https://anarch.cc/uploads/deleuze-guattari/a-thousand-plateaus.pdf
"The importance some have accorded metaphor and metonymy proves disastrous for the study of language. Metaphors and metonymies are merely effects; they are a part of language only when they presuppose indirect discourse. There are many passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speaking in tongues: that is why all discourse is indirect, and the translative movement proper to language is that of indirect discourse."
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Postulates of Linguistics
https://anarch.cc/uploads/deleuze-guattari/a-thousand-plateaus.pdf
"If we interpret the word "like" as a metaphor, or propose a structural analogy of relations (man-iron = dog-bone), we understand nothing of becoming. The word "like" is one of those words that change drastically in meaning and function when they are used in connection with haecceities, when they are made into expressions of becomings instead of signified states or signifying relations. A dog may exercise its jaw on iron, but when it does it is using its jaw as a molar organ. When Lolito eats iron, it is totally different: he makes his jaw enter into composition with the iron in such a way that he himself becomes the jaw of a molecular dog"
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Becoming-...
https://anarch.cc/uploads/deleuze-guattari/a-thousand-plateaus.pdf