“The city is an extension not strong enough for its own weight. The final crust on the edge of a peninsula, stuck out at the edge of the ocean like a dare–the kind that you know you won’t live through but that you go for anyway because you’re young and you don’t give a shit and there’s no backing down. But the city is old. It keeps daring itself not to bury its dead.”
-Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
“Wife three, it must be said, looked radiant, though it was a cold radiance like that of a blade. Treat me like an object of pity, her bearing announced, hint that I was somehow to blame, and I will cut you.”
-Sigrid Nunez
“He was very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham — plain and pale, but intelligent and smiling.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“A man used to live near us in a big two-storey house. The house was of concrete, with decorated concrete blocks, and it was in a lovely ochre colour with chocolate wood facings, everything so neat and nice it look like something to eat.”
-V.S. Naipaul
“They kept reaching for each other’s waists and drawing their hands quickly away, as if testing the heat of a fire.”
-Jamel Brinkley
“I sit at my window and the words fly past me like birds–with God’s help I catch some.”
-Jean Rhys
“Strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, youth–she read him like a page.”
-Virginia Woolf
“I commence shaving my head, head shaving as meditation. The old sensation of the clippers is a pleasure that never diminishes, the buzz is dulling and senseless in my ears. My little hairs drift down to the mouth of the toilet and start forming like a rare algae on the surface.”
-Gabe Habash
“My saliva became like hot bitter glue.”
-Ralph Ellison
The Simile Museum 