“She helped her friend Timo gut his house, ripping pipes and wires out of the walls, like popping the bones out of a corpse. They’d pried out windows like scooping eyeballs, leaving the house staring blindly across the street at equally eyeless homes, and she’d written up the experience — a family home of three generations made valueless because the suburb’s water had gone dry and Phoenix wouldn’t allow a hookup.”
-Paolo Bacigalupi
“He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and is shy and flushes easily, pink as a peony.”
-Jill Lepore
“stay sucking on my tongue which is a problem this very moment cuz of a canker sore on the roof of my mouth. the foam earplugs are a similar color to my earwax just less toasty. half-dreaming about the plane doing circles and halfnightmaring three separate planes nosediving. this my mandatory time to thinkaboutdyin. underneath us the scenery is flat and carved into squares like lemon bars.”
-marcus scott williams
“And so, in those places left vacant by the erroneous reassembly of our selves, the remnants of our amnesias lived like a brood of wasps.”
-Ingrid Rojas Contreras
“I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere.”
-Denis Johnson
“When I had been there a little longer, and had seen this phase of crystal clearness followed by long stretches of sunless cold; when the storms of February had pitched their white tents about the devoted village and the wild cavalry of March winds had charged down to their support; I began to understand why Starkfield emerged from its six months’ siege like a starved garrison capitulating without quarter.”
-Edith Wharton
“I still remembered the moment they first arrived, their spaceships burning the atmosphere like comets, like falling angels, and how we’d surrounded the ships in horror, aiming for their thin legs with anything we could find, because the rest of their bodies were armored but the legs snapped like pencils.”
-Brenda Peynado
“I identified the flaws, the weaknesses of my characters–and exploited them–like a thumb digging into the rotten spot of an apple.”
-Benjamin Percy
“But I couldn’t hear what he was saying, and I still couldn’t make out the words when smoke rose around him and he stood holding a giant seashell the size of a baseball glove filled with tobacco and this long, thick, bushy thing I’d later learn was sage that burned and smelled calm, like salt water.”
-Morgan Talty
“I feel an invisibility / like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long / accelerator, where what cannot / be seen is inferred by what the visible / does.”
-Sharon Olds
The Simile Museum 