“He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony.”
-Jill Lepore
The Simile Museum
Tag: New Yorker
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
October 14, 2021
“it was the longest day of the year, and the Irish Sea had a metallic tint. The waves were tiny but insistent, like uncoöperative children.”
-D.T. Max
April 7, 2021
“Constitutionalism didn’t burst from the head of James Madison, like Athena from Zeus, simply on account of all the books he’d read. Sure, constitutionalism flew from the pages of those books, but it was also shot from the barrel of a gun.”
-Jill Lepore
February 3, 2021
“When I write, it’s as if I were butchering eels… I pay little attention to the unpleasantness of the operation.”
-Elena Ferrante
November 18, 2020
“It was hard to tell the nature of the look from across the expanse of equipment, under the gym’s flattening fluorescent light. Either way, she had her pale eyes fixed on him, and every once in a while, in the middle of a set, she gave him an effortful smile. The amount of weight she was lifting, he saw, was significant. An immense iron stack rose up slowly behind her like an omen.”
-Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
July 24, 2020
“At the time, a good portion of the rock music played on the radio–Imagine Dragons, Linkin Park–was so densely and fastidiously produced, so airless and unrelenting, that listening to it felt like getting whopped in the face with a snowball. ‘Boys & Girls’ suggested a different way forward: it was not without potency, but it drifted in like a salty breeze.”
-Amanda Petrusich
September 10, 2018
“I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling first one and then the other.”
-Miranda July
The Simile Museum 