“The Boston T was completely different from the New York subway–the lines named after colors, the cars so clean and small, like toys. And yet it wasn’t a toy, grown men used it, with serious expressions on their faces.”
-Elif Batuman
The Simile Museum
Category: Uncategorized
April 25, 2018
“Write enough, and your stylistic tendencies will eventually make themselves visible, like water finding its level. This is both your promise, and your challenge.”
-John Keene
April 16, 2018
“We all got into the back of a taxi together and started fixing up our seat belts. Bobbi sat in the middle, with her head turned to speak to Melissa, so I could see the back of her neck and her little spoon-like ear.”
-Sally Rooney
April 9, 2018
“This seemingly futile moment marked the beginning of our long journey toward nothingness, into the craggy pits of this measly universe. Generation after generation, our bodies have been coated with the dust of death. Our hearts have been extinguished, our lives leveled. We are weary, thin as rakes, hacked into pieces. But we believe our duty is to persevere against a world hell-bent on eliminating the few who dare to sprout in the collective manure of degenerate humans. That’s where I come into the picture. I–astonished and amazed at the magnitude of darkness that surrounds us–am the last in a long line of valiant thinkers.”
-Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
April 1, 2018
“He cradled his hand to his chest like a broken bird.”
-Emily St. John Mandel
March 14, 2018
“That first morning, belief in art as a cultural value in its own right felt intellectually correct but deeply abstract, far removed, like an object underwater.”
-Leslie Jamison
February 19, 2018
“Leaning back on his rattan chair, sporting a white T-shirt and khakis, his perfect ankles exposed because he wore no socks with his boat shoes, he was cool as ice cream even in the tropical weather.”
-Viet Thanh Nguyen
February 13, 2018
“It left my sister Greta, younger than me by two years but with test scores that painted me a remedial toddler by comparison, with a tic that made her pull out her hair until the white bald patches of her scalp shone through like flags of surrender.”
-Xhenet Aliu
February 5, 2018
“The change is small, but it’s enough to increase the melt rate on the underside of these glaciers. Floating ice shelves, which grow like fingernails where the glaciers meet the ocean, are particularly vulnerable to melting from below.”
-Jeff Goodell
February 1, 2018
“You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin
The Simile Museum 