“At twenty-one, the writer in me was like a fly in the room–alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone.”
-Jhumpa Lahiri
The Simile Museum
Tag: Nonfiction
August 3, 2020
“My family was like living with cruel cats. Someone would turn as you entered a room. Oh it’s you. So I waited for the night when I could be by myself and work.”
-Eileen Myles
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
May 7, 2020
“Lenu and Lila define themselves through and against each other, each like a book that the other is reading, each representing an alternate story of what life might be”
-Jia Tolentino
November 26, 2018
“A pale face like a peeled potato.”
-Natalia Ginzburg
August 5, 2018
“A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you’ve never heard before.”
-Alexander Chee
July 17, 2018
“At the same time, the natural autonomy of horizontalism, and its deep reliance on independent, small affinity groups of activists, encourages a constant drive to innovate. This self-overcoming is the engine of our velocity. It grants us the power to wobble, to swerve like a flock of birds and to act in ways that confound our enemy, as events quickly spiral toward the people’s vision.”
-Micah White
June 16, 2018
“There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true in gleams and fragments. Then its countenance waxes stern and grand, and we see that it must be true.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
February 5, 2018
“The change is small, but it’s enough to increase the melt rate on the underside of these glaciers. Floating ice shelves, which grow like fingernails where the glaciers meet the ocean, are particularly vulnerable to melting from below.”
-Jeff Goodell
January 4, 2018
“Outdoor meetings in America are rare, their atmosphere always surcharged with impending clashes between the audience and the police. Not so in England. Here the right to assemble constantly in the open is an institution. It has become a British habit, like bacon for breakfast.”
-Emma Goldman
