“One of them bubbled out of the ground with a crystalline spurt and a sort of sob, and then carved its own sandy bed. But it was no sooner born than it lost confidence and plunged underground again. The other spring, almost invisible, brushed over the grass like a snake and spread itself secretly in the middle of a meadow where the narcissus, flowering in a ring, alone bore witness to its presence.”
-Colette
“Only two women in my family have poisoned their husbands. The rest curl in on themselves like dried pig ears, fish-hooked spines, walking question marks asking Is it safe here?”
-Lauren Albin
“Your heart like a hawk-mouth in the sun, your heart like a ship on an atoll, your heart like a compass needle driven mad by a little piece of lead, like washing drying in the wind, like a whining of horses, like seed thrown to the birds, like an evening paper one has finished reading! Your heart is a charade that the whole world has guessed.”
-Louis Aragon
“Electrical wires reach from poles and rooftops, webbing the overcast sky like a cracked windowpane.”
-Kelly Luce
“For a long while she lay on her sweaty sheets listening to the cacophony of toucans and araras and howler monkeys, rude and relentless as dengue.”
-Edward Hamlin
“As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the skeleton of a stranded walrus.”
-Herman Melville
“Too true about endings in poetry. All these closures are made a bit silly by the way everything is opened up again a page later. It’s kind of art living at a microbe’s pace, or at most a shrew’s, but not ever a person’s, like a novel, or a crocodile’s, like a sculpture.”
-Max Ritvo
“The twins are blond with big heads, skinny bodies dangling below like strings under balloons.”
-Amber Sparks
“Lord Byron made a show of his grief and sent for her body as if it were a rare volume, the thing that had been missing from his library all along.”
-Megan Mayhew Bergman
“When she desireth the opener of the cans, so as to turn the knob designed for arthritic hands with which she is happily acquainted, but the large person with whom she liveth denieth her the opener of the cans for the ancillary reason of the proximate rotating blade, she throws her head back and cries like a featherless bird.”
-Rivka Galchen
The Simile Museum 