vivid figures of speech

I started listening to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea yesterday. Librivox has the F. P. Walter translation in its catalog. It's about 16 hours long.

"The philosopher Diderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clue to his character, and this stocky little man was certainly a living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers. But I was never in a position to verify this because, around me, he used only an odd and utterly incomprehensible dialect" (somewhere in part I, chapter 8; emphasis mine).

Ah, I love that sentence.