“I could see that Louise was perplexed by all this. She had been warned of the damp, but nothing had prepared her for those lumps of bodies, or for the empty sky. At four o’clock every day the sun appeared. It hung over the northwest horizon for a few minutes, like a malediction, and then it vanished and the city sank into the night.”
-Mavis Gallant
“Their egos were as fragile as Sèvres porcelain or tropical fruit.”
-Richard Francis
“She had a head full of thick black hair, and a thin face, pale as sugar — a pretty girl. So pretty, in fact, that you didn’t notice right off that she was missing an arm.
-Wells Tower
“But the beach is standing still today. Everyone on it is tranquilized, numb, or asleep. Teenaged girls rub coconut oil on each other’s hard-to-reach places. They smell like macaroons. They pry open compacts like clamshells; mirrors catch the sun and throw a spray of white rays across glazed shoulders. The girls arrange their wet hair with silk flowers they way they learned in Seventeen. They pose.
-Amy Hempel
“Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren’t hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose.
-Leslie Jamison
“I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church.”
-James M. Cain
“She had icicles dangling off her yarn hair; her large fingers nearly were frozen, like links of meat one might keep in the freezer.”
-Kate Bernheimer
“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
-Edith Wharton
“Sprawled near Brother, his flame-red tongue hidden from them, his indigo face closed, Sixo slept through dinner like a corpse.”
-Toni Morrison
“She was all charm, beauty, perfect grace, with a forehead like the new moon, eyes like those of a deer or a wild heifer, eyebrows like the crescent in the month of Sha’ban, cheeks like red anemones, mouth like the seal of Solomon, lips like red carnelian, teeth like a row of pearls set in coral, neck like a cake for a king, bosom like a fountain, breasts like a pair of big pomegranates resembling a rabbit with uplifted ears, and a belly with a navel like a cup that holds a pound of benzoin ointment.”
-The Arabian Nights
The Simile Museum 