The Simile Museum

Tag: Nonfiction

“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”

“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?”

“Pandas even head away from other pandas, like stars in the universe, spreading farther and farther apart (you can never be too far away to say goodbye)–except their territory is neither infinite nor expanding, and in order to deliver more panda bears into existence, they can’t just scatter into particles at the end. Pandas come together every two years or so; marriage isn’t always a marriage of the mind.”

-Amy Leach

“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

“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

“The operatic tradition had always been divided over the relationship between music and drama, and this debate had reemerged in Lloyd Webber’s day. His contemporary Stephen Sondheim was a studied modernist who brought dramatic heft to musical theater in the 1970s. By contrast, Lloyd Webber had no ear for drama; his characters simply declaimed their emotions directly into the audience, as if by T-shirt cannon.”

-Andrea Long Chu

“Corresponding with him was like playing squash with an opponent who pockets your serve, walks off the court and returns four months later to fire it back.”

-Dwight Garner

“He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony.”

-Jill Lepore

“Reading about craft is like listening to yourself breathe.”

-Zadie Smith

“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