“He looked awful, as moist and pale as certain veined cheeses.”
-Sam Lipsyte, “Final Boy”
The Simile Museum
Tag: New Yorker
August 8, 2025
“I doubt we talked about Italian Renaissance painting as we walked down the gravel path away from the library…but surely there was talk, miles of it in an instant, like a fast train that kept picking up speed, passing scene after blurry scene as we raced toward a destination we didn’t know, couldn’t know, on that first day, a day that contained all our days together and all the days after that, because your soul knows everything about a new love before you do.”
-Hilton Als, “Finding a Family of Boys”
July 15, 2025
“Overcoming the reticence at the heart of her shyness was like scaling a cliff only to discover another view of the real summit farther off.”
-Jim Shepard, “The Queen of Bad Influences”
March 17, 2025
“By the end of Tr*mp’s first month in office, universities had been squeezed like stress balls, into new and painful forms.”
-Nathan Heller, “Will Harvard Bend or Break?”
January 27, 2024
“He closed his eyes. His head felt refreshed from the freezer still, his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day.”
-Joy Williams, “The Beach House”
October 14, 2023
“I got into the Murphy’s car with Sedona and her twin brother, Patrick, and their mother, Maggie; the pigeons were in their wooden case in the back seat, muttering to themselves like old men in a bingo hall.”
-Susan Orlean
July 25, 2023
“How inconspicuously narrative winds around us, soft as fog; how efficiently it enables us to forget to look up and ask: What is it that story does not allow us to see?”
– Parul Sehgal
December 6, 2022
“He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony.”
-Jill Lepore
July 31, 2022
“The rain lightened, and then turned to gravelly pellets of ice. It began to patter his windshield like the taps of someone trying to get his attention.”
-Rachel Kushner
November 2, 2021
“Over time, many small infatuations rippled the surface of her mind, like the spring breeze that makes new leaves tremble without changing their life’s course.”
-Tove Ditlevsen
The Simile Museum 