“I pass, like night, from land to land.”
-Samuel Coleridge
The Simile Museum
Tag: Simile
November 4, 2015
“Still rose the dune sea, and like a sea, now making its own weather. Sparkling white slopes superheated the skies above, setting the air achurn with funnels, drawing hurricanes of dust from as far away as Saskatchewan. Self-perpetuating, then, the sand a magnet for its own mixture of clay, sulfates, and carbonate particles from the pulverized bodies of ancient marine creatures, so high in saline that a sample taken from anywhere on the dune would be salty on the tongue.”
– Claire Vaye Watkins
October 28, 2015
“Her first love was an unresponsive Guards officer, her last the homosexual painter Pavel Tchelitchew; but her truest lover was the photographer Cecil Beaton, who made her lovely, finding her complexion fresh as that of a convolvulus, her eyebrows like tapering mouse-tails, the noble forehead like tissue-paper, her wrists like delicate stems, and her visage entire flooded with the mad moon-struck ethereality of a ghost.”
-Paul West
October 22, 2015
“Nothing seemed to belong to them organically, to be stamped with their own identity, but no one seemed to expect that. Even the painters and writers wore disguises which outdid Venetian masked balls. The beards of men shipwrecked for years on desert islands, the unmatched clothes from thrift shops, the girls with hair uncombed, and black cotton stockings, and eyes painted a tubercular violet. In this costume they meant to convey a break with conventions, with the stylish mannequins in Beverly Hills shop windows, but it created the impression of merely another uniform, which they bore self-consciously, and it did not portray freedom, nonchalance. They wore them stiffly, as if on display, like extras for a Bohemian scene, proclaiming: Look at me.”
– Anaïs Nin
October 14, 2015
“Stay away from pop music. It is too crudely percussive. Sounds like gun fire.
We already have enough of that.”
– William H. Gass
October 7, 2015
“It’s funny how love can jump from one person to another, like a flea.”
– Ottessa Moshfegh
September 13, 2015
“Later, when I got home, I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a while. It was the same mirror Katie and I used to stare at in the pitch black while chanting ‘Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary’ over and over until we hallucinated the beheaded head of Mary Queen of Scots emerging in reflection, dripping like a porterhouse steak.”
-Stacey Richter
September 10, 2015
“He had never presented flowers to Fiona before. Or to anyone else. He entered the building feeling like a hopeless lover or a guilty husband in a cartoon.”
-Alice Munro
September 2, 2015
“And she said, Oh, Jon, you break my heart, that night when you came to my Tarp you were like a lion taking what he wanted but now you are like some bunny wiffling his nose in fright.”
-George Saunders
The Simile Museum 