“A story is like water that you heat for your bath. It takes messages between the fire and your skin. It lets them meet, and it cleans you!
-Rumi
“The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother.”
-Joseph Conrad
“Sometimes the midday silence of the house is so large it’s like a thought.”
-Tony Cohan
“When I turn around all I see is the Mississippi Bridge: its great latticework of girders is gridded against the southern horizon like a waffle iron, filled with blue sky as with batter.”
-Bennett Sims
“Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.”
-Gustave Flaubert
“The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over towards the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.”
-Marilynne Robinson
“All of his tenderness is like a minotaur gazing at a cow.”
-Guy Davenport
“Words, like a procession, rush across a bridge which is usually drawn up and has even grown rusted from the love of solitude.”
-Anaïs Nin
“She sat there naked, propped up on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone.”
-Raymond Chandler
“My great grandmother. I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it.”
-Sandra Cisneros
The Simile Museum 