“When they pulled up to the house, she followed her father, who insisted on carrying her suitcase, to the front door. She stepped inside after him and suddenly stopped. The house felt different, smelled different even, as if it were a living organism whose basic chemistry had changed.”
-Brit Bennett
“She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart.”
-Margaret Atwood
“Jackson doesn’t participate in these conversations. Either he genuinely has nothing to say about the current state and future of his country, the entire world; or he doesn’t want to express his opinions. I get the feeling Jackson is like a train on a single track–one of those airport monorails. He goes around and around, the doors opening and closing, people he doesn’t know and doesn’t care to know getting in and getting out.”
-Melanie Finn
“Say nothing. Let her button her shirt, let her comb her hair, the sound of it stretching like a sheet of fire between you.”
-Junot Díaz
“It is remembering how powerful the word ‘system’ made us grad students feel, how it tricked us into imagining locations and targets, pillars we could smash, wires we could cut. It is arriving at the proper sense of wonder at the atmosphere we once called ‘the system.’ It is being told over the phone that you have won an award and finally getting that metaphor (‘the system’), finally grasping, after all these years, that change is more cunning than we were prepared for, that change is as gentle as the snow falling faintly onto the surface of the lake outside while we wait for the server to bring the bill.”
– Kevin Birmingham
“Across from the pits, all the foreclosed houses are abandoned. The empty sockets of front yards, yanked from the ground like teeth, are filled with rain. It’s kind of beautiful in the darkness, as though the neighborhood is floating.”
-Alexander Weinstein
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
-Virginia Woolf
“Finally Silber appeared–no bird mask, thank God–in a black cape that he supposed could resemble wings, over black leather pants and boots. He swayed from one side of the stage to the other, staggered almost, like a drunk, like someone on strings, helpless, confused, maybe even horrified. He did not smile.”
-Porochista Khakpour
“I had no dimples, my mouth was wide, my hair grew crimped and fierce as wild lettuce from my head.”
-Danielle Dutton
“No one is in sight, but in months the white sands will be populated by the sunburned bodies of white tourists. From a plane flying overhead they might look like seals, their heads titled toward the rays, bodies open for as much exposure as possible, basking in luxury.”
-Nicole Dennis-Benn
The Simile Museum 