“It left my sister Greta, younger than me by two years but with test scores that painted me a remedial toddler by comparison, with a tic that made her pull out her hair until the white bald patches of her scalp shone through like flags of surrender.”
-Xhenet Aliu
“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
“You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin
“Snow fell like clots of wet laundry.”
-Lisa Ko
“The mixture of wine and dreary weather is like a barnacle on the hull of my sinking mood, and I consider calling in sick for the afternoon, going home, retreating into a prolonged coma-nap.”
-Cate Dicharry
“In her mind, she had ridden the Shimonoseki ferry, the Osaka train, and even the trolley that could outpace a boy running or cycling. As cars drove past them, she marveled that they did look like metal bulls on wheels, which was what Hansu had called them. She was a country girl, but she had heard of all these things. Yet she could not let on that she knew of uniformed ticket collectors, immigration officers, porters, and of trolleys, electric lamps, kerosene stoves, and telephones, so at the trolley stop, Sunja remained quiet and still like a seedling sprouting from new soil, upright and open to collect the light. She would have uprooted herself to have seen the world with him, and now she was seeing it without him.”
-Min Jin Lee
“His presence is like an alarm clock that never stops ringing.”
-Nell Zink
“The house felt almost as much like a ship as a house. Placed there to ride out storms, it was built into the island as though it were part of it; but you saw the sea from all the windows and there was good cross ventilation so that you slept cool on the hottest nights. The house was painted white to be cool in the summer and it could be seen from a long way out in the Gulf Stream.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little micro-climate. “
-Claire Dederer
“When they cut open his ankle and leg for the long bones, I see Pete’s Achille’s tendon. It looks like the eye of a round roast.”
-Amy Savage
The Simile Museum 