“Bertie tried to keep the grin on his face, to show Gert excitement, but it was slipping between his fingers like sand.”
-Milo Todd, The Lilac People
The Simile Museum
Tag: Novel
February 17, 2025
“There was nothing worse for a man than an awareness of his own obsolescence, the ticking of his heart marking time, like the second hand of a clock–mechanism of duty now more than desire, of memory more than moment.”
-Katherine Min, The Fetishist
January 13, 2025
“I’d stopped singing classical after leaving college and my deeper upbringing had reclaimed my voice like moss overgrowing the sides of an old house, slowly mulching it into consonance with nature.”
-Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations
December 7, 2024
“That night I told Harris about the telephotographer, the real estate card, and the death of our neighbor. I was glad to have something major to report on; he had to say something—a man had died.
‘That’s sad. He was a young guy.’ Each word said like a dollar he wished he was spending elsewhere.”
-Miranda July, All Fours
February 10, 2024
“I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.”
-Madeline Miller, Circe
December 31, 2023
“We ate with our elbows and didn’t speak. We let our knives narrate. My mother caught crickets in the backyard and panfried them with sesame oil. Bent over the table, my father packed his stomach like a suitcase, folding pieces of pork in half before sealing them into his mouth.”
-K-Ming Chang
December 21, 2023
“Ari did most of his work from home and liked to move his office around at the press of a button, so that the staircase that ran through the center of the building was the only fixed unit, and all the other rooms slid up and down like beads on an abacus.”
-Helen Oyeyemi
October 27, 2023
“‘I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,’ I told him. ‘I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?'”
-Yoko Ogawa
October 4, 2023
“I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.”
-James Baldwin
August 28, 2023
“But the young woman hasn’t exactly entered, she’s drifted down like a dead leaf, and the lowest depth is behind the door that has Ladies on it, the large, tiled room, with four doors to the right and four doors to the left.”
-Jenny Erpenbeck
The Simile Museum 