“From the second floor he faces the night, the city in its icy white light, the skeletal trees in the square, and thirty feet below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears.”
-Ian McEwan
The Simile Museum
February 1, 2019
January 13, 2019
“There are touches like bridles you can kick away, and then there are touches that startle you into temporary submission, like the universe catching its breath: body against stunned body, mind against bright mind. A sudden snare of recognition. Wildness regarding itself.”
-Amy Bonnaffons
December 12, 2018
“Sunrise was heating the ring of the horizon
and clouds were rising like leaves.”
-Derek Walcott
December 2, 2018
“There is something feckless about a writer’s journals. They are a specialist’s document, and those who parse their pages are like grooming baboons, searching for fleas.”
-Dustin Illingworth
November 26, 2018
“A pale face like a peeled potato.”
-Natalia Ginzburg
November 11, 2018
“Wife three, it must be said, looked radiant, though it was a cold radiance like that of a blade. Treat me like an object of pity, her bearing announced, hint that I was somehow to blame, and I will cut you.”
-Sigrid Nunez
October 30, 2018
“He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham — plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
October 12, 2018
“A man used to live near us in a big two-storey house. The house was of concrete, with decorated concrete blocks, and it was in a lovely ochre colour with chocolate wood facings, everything so neat and nice it look like something to eat.”
-V.S. Naipaul
October 7, 2018
“They kept reaching for each other’s waists and drawing their hands quickly away, as if testing the heat of a fire.”
-Jamel Brinkley
September 22, 2018
“I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds–with God’s help I catch some.”
-Jean Rhys
The Simile Museum 