“My daddy’s face is a study. Winter moves into it and presides there. His eyes become a cliff of snow threatening to avalanche; his eyebrows bend like black limbs of leafless trees.”
-Toni Morrison
The Simile Museum
April 6, 2015
“The Bulge, for example, was not a place, but a description: it is the description of the line of battle–the MLR, or Main Line of Resistance. Eventually, everything comes down to geometry, to volume and to mass. First there was a line, then there was an attack, and the line bulged, like my wife’s belly while she was carrying our son. A sleek and tender curve, gravid with hope and risk.”
-T.M. McNally
March 28, 2015
And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.
-Evelyn Waugh
March 27, 2015
“I don’t expect the anxiety to go away
but I want the anxiety to know
its place in the scheme of things
of which I seem to consist.
I want anxiety to be
not an attention getter or star,
but faceless, like a butler bearing trays”
-Michael Dennis Brown
March 19, 2015
“The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a multitude of violins…”
-Angela Carter
March 13, 2015
“Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one.”
-James Matthew Barrie
March 8, 2015
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
-Joan Didion
March 7, 2015
“She wonders, Why do other people have pets? Is it for the same bad reason as she? What is her bad reason? She doesn’t know. They aren’t even cute, the turtles, this one especially. It looks like an oven mitt.”
-Deb Olin Unferth
March 1, 2015
“They hold each other. Julie is very white, her hair prickly-short. The room’s darkness is pocked with little bits of Los Angeles, at night, through glass. The dark drifts down around them and fits like a gardener’s glove.”
-David Foster Wallace
February 25, 2015
“The yachts, the gleaming motor launches, the sloops, the tern schooners with crews of twenty, they ringed our barge like ants feeding from a fat aphid day and night.”
-Stanley Crawford
The Simile Museum 