“She, Laura, likes to imagine (it’s one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged.”
-Michael Cunningham
“She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse. They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience — a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.”
-Paolo Bacigalupi
“He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony.”
-Jill Lepore
“stay sucking on my tongue which is a problem this very moment cuz of a canker sore on the roof of my mouth. the foam earplugs are a similar color to my earwax just less toasty. half-dreaming about the plane doing circles and halfnightmaring three separate planes nosediving. this my mandatory time to thinkaboutdyin. underneath us the scenery is flat and carved into squares like lemon bars.”
-marcus scott williams
“And so, in those places left vacant by the erroneous reassembly of our selves, the remnants of our amnesias lived like a brood of wasps.”
-Ingrid Rojas Contreras
“The first café I came across looked glassed in at first, plasticked in at closer inspection. It would be open-air in summer, but this evening, through the not fully transparent plastic, with the fluorescent light and the cigarette smoke, the patrons looked embalmed, as if submerged in amber. And among the preserved sat Emma.”
-Rabih Alameddine
“I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere.”
-Denis Johnson
“When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.”
-Edith Wharton
“I still remembered the moment they first arrived, their spaceships burning the atmosphere like comets, like falling angels, and how we’d surrounded the ships in horror, aiming for their thin legs with anything we could find, because the rest of their bodies were armored but the legs snapped like pencils.”
-Brenda Peynado
“I identified the flaws, the weaknesses of my characters–and exploited them–like a thumb digging into the rotten spot of an apple.”
-Benjamin Percy
The Simile Museum 