“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
Tag: New Yorker
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
August 30, 2018
“The effect of this was palpable and immediate, and she felt as if she were petting a large skittish animal, like a horse or a bear, skillfully coaxing it to eat from her hand.”
-Kristen Roupenian
February 22, 2017
“Say nothing. Let her button her shirt, let her comb her hair, the sound of it stretching like a sheet of fire between you.”
-Junot Díaz
The Simile Museum 