“They are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily.”
– Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
The Simile Museum
Tag: Simile
May 13, 2023
“Maria sits on the pallet, hands in her lap like broken sparrows.”
-Anthony Doerr
May 3, 2023
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin
April 25, 2023
“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
April 2, 2023
“And here, the baptismal gowns of lost children, like limp little ghosts.”
-Kirstin Valdez Quade
March 25, 2023
“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
March 18, 2023
“I drove home, weeping out of helplessness. My hands were shaking, and now I knew this would end badly. With a sigh of relief, the Samurai stopped outside the house, as if it were on my side in everything, I pressed my face against the steering wheel. The horn responded sadly, like a summons. Like a cry of mourning.”
-Olga Tokarczuk
February 12, 2023
“She looked to be in her midthirties, about fifteen or so years behind him, and rather tall, with long straight hair parted to the right and rounded eyes like the portholes on a ship.”
-Pitchaya Sudbanthad
January 14, 2023
“Suddenly Wally stooped, reached down, and heaved Sir Arthur out in a fireman’s lift. He flung him over his shoulder like an old bag of oats.”
-Samuel Steward
January 5, 2023
“She, Laura, likes to imagine (it’s one of her most closely held secrets) that she has a touch of brilliance herself, just a hint of it, though she knows most people probably walk around with similar hopeful suspicions curled up like tiny fists inside them, never divulged.”
-Michael Cunningham
The Simile Museum 