“The Bulge, for example, was not a place, but a description: it is the description of the line of battle–the MLR, or Main Line of Resistance. Eventually, everything comes down to geometry, to volume and to mass. First there was a line, then there was an attack, and the line bulged, like my wife’s belly while she was carrying our son. A sleek and tender curve, gravid with hope and risk.”
-T.M. McNally
And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.
-Evelyn Waugh
“I don’t expect the anxiety to go away
but I want the anxiety to know
its place in the scheme of things
of which I seem to consist.
I want anxiety to be
not an attention getter or star,
but faceless, like a butler bearing trays”
-Michael Dennis Brown
“The citronade of the pale morning sun shimmered like a multitude of violins…”
-Angela Carter
“Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one.”
-James Matthew Barrie
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
-Joan Didion
“The yachts, the gleaming motor launches, the sloops, the tern schooners with crews of twenty, they ringed our barge like ants feeding from a fat aphid day and night.”
-Stanley Crawford
“The hunger as big as a bear.”
-Alberto Ríos
“The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were an island she’d washed up on.”
-Jenny Offil
“So. What do you think? Are you convinced now I’m as crazy as a tulip or a taxi? As vagrant as a cloud?”
-Sandra Cisneros
The Simile Museum 