Metaphors: quilts, steam, lights

Live long enough and your life is like a quilt — stages patched together. I’m looking now at a piece of my marooncorduroypepsquad skirt sewn into a quilt. Pep squad was for all of us not cut out to be cheerleaders.

Sort of a consolation prize.

Anyway, if life is like a quilt can we instead simply say life is a quilt? Does that make “quilt” a metaphor?

I’m asking.

My dictionary o-ers this example of a …