“She remained there motionless, sitting like a mother who affects not to notice the rude or awkward conduct of her children who, in the course of their play, are speaking to people whom she does not know, it was impossible for me to determine whether she approved or condemned the vagrancy of her eyes in the careless detachment of her heart.”
-Marcel Proust
“The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said.”
-Carolyn Forché
“Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper”
-Elizabeth Bishop
“Here’s Jacob: thirty-four god-damn years old, rock in his hand, beard like a troubled distraction, like an itch, the red eyes of someone sleepless and wild. Here’s Jacob, tongue-cottoned and pale, ragged and unkempt. He looks like an old man, or like an old man dipped in wax. It’s bad. He looks like people you see on the street and you think, ‘Jesus fuck, what happened to that guy?’ His beard is a dead animal glued to his face.”
-Zulema Renee Summerfield
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.”
– James Baldwin
“Standing in the bathroom she was as anonymous as a chicken.”
-Clarice Lispector
“Words are like leaves, some wither every year”
-Horace
“It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.”
-Lauren Groff
“The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.”
-Tracy K. Smith
The Simile Museum 