“They were all growing up exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair?”
– Roberto Bolaño
“A yellow convertible stopped. A girl leaned out the passenger window and snapped several photographs. She looked at me and laughed, then the convertible sped away, the wind blowing the girl’s blond hair straight up like a flame.”
-Sarai Walker
“Magda was quiet, but her eyes were horribly alive, like blue tigers.”
-Cynthia Ozick
“She moved all the time, cutting up her life into bits like food for a child, stopping by once or twice a year to sleep on the couch.”
– Gabe Habash
“On the tarmac at Heathrow the plane full of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read.”
-Rachel Cusk
“He was wearing a shiny, oversize dark-brown suit. His hair was shaved close to his head and he had a nose that hung from his face like a door off its hinges.”
-Hannah Tinti
“Jane rises. A stiff rustle from the carnation sprigs. She leans over the king’s chair and taps the back of his hand: briskly, as if she were testing a cheese.”
-Hilary Mantel
“Monsieur Chabot was longing to smoke, but he didn’t dare ask if he might. Nor had he the courage to look at his son. All he did, therefore, was stand still and keep quiet, and he looked the picture of embarrassment, like an indigent patient in a fashionable doctor’s waiting room.”
-Georges Simenon
“It seemed that the fire went north away from the road, then whipped back down toward us.
It teased like a living, malevolent thing, intent on causing pain and terror. It drove us before it like dogs chasing a rabbit. Yet it didn’t eat us. It could have, but it didn’t.”
-Octavia Butler
The Simile Museum 