“The image of Remedios the magistrate’s younger daughter, who, because of her age, could have been his daughter, kept paining him in some part of his body. It was a physical sensation that almost bothered him when he walked, like a pebble in his shoe.”
–Gabriel García Márquez
“I hated you because living with you was like living with a microwave: you never talked, sometimes you made me food, and you always sat in the same room, blinking, spinning that plate in your head.”
-Matthew Baker
“Well why did you come over. I invited you to my home. He looked me straight in the face. We paused for a moment like animals who hear a loud bang. I’ll let you out, he said.”
-Eileen Myles
“Wet furry fields lay like the stomachs of soft animals bared to the sky.”
-Julia O’Faolain
“And Mother, startled, shook
out a dress with big peonies splashed like dirt
across the front, as if she had fallen
chasing after me in the rain.”
– Susan Mitchell
“… where other children ran about in the glades and pressed their naked bellies, though sheltered from the moon, against the trunks of beeches and oaks that were as sturdy as adult mountaineers whose short thighs bulged beneath their buckskin breeches, at a spot stripped of its bark, in such a way as to receive on the tender skin of their little white bellies the discharge of sap in the spring…”
-Jean Genet
“Four days stretched out like the creation of toffee.”
-Elizabeth George
“He has a face like a catcher’s mitt. The whole thing puckers inward, drooping with the memory of some dropped fly ball.”
-Karen Russell
“It was warm weather, and you could see the girls’ legs again. One day Florence saw him watching and she said the young girls come out in spring, like snakes.”
– Andre Dubus
“Now I heard a funny noise, like water squeaking at high pressures from the insides of a cat.”
– Rajesh Parameswaran
The Simile Museum 