“At twenty-one, the writer in me was like a fly in the room–alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone.”
-Jhumpa Lahiri
The Simile Museum
August 27, 2020
“Also, I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’m wheezing like a ruptured accordion.”
– Colin Wentworth
August 11, 2020
“Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.”
-Patricia Highsmith
August 3, 2020
“My family was like living with cruel cats. Someone would turn as you entered a room. Oh it’s you. So I waited for the night when I could be by myself and work.”
-Eileen Myles
July 24, 2020
“At the time, a good portion of the rock music played on the radio–Imagine Dragons, Linkin Park–was so densely and fastidiously produced, so airless and unrelenting, that listening to it felt like getting whopped in the face with a snowball. ‘Boys & Girls’ suggested a different way forward: it was not without potency, but it drifted in like a salty breeze.”
-Amanda Petrusich
July 12, 2020
“He felt the white scalloped ends of Miguel’s fingernails against his jawbone, running across the margins of him like a poem. Finding something to like, something to correct. Reading, always, with rapt sincerity.”
-Caitlin Horrocks
May 7, 2020
“Lenu and Lila define themselves through and against each other, each like a book that the other is reading, each representing an alternate story of what life might be”
-Jia Tolentino
May 1, 2020
“The man laughed and left us on the curb and went back and handed a bill to the driver in the middle of a great honking and some yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazine moving off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.”
-Sylvia Plath
April 12, 2020
“Truth is, I hardly understood half of what the gold man said. I’d never seen a train, didn’t know the ocean route he spoke of, or where the workers had come from. But I understood his gold. I didn’t ask questions. He had a gold watch the size of my palm that he flicked as he talked. He was fat enough that I could cling like a tick to his wealth.”
-C Pam Zhang
March 1, 2020
“Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted–my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.”
-Ottessa Moshfegh
