“He closed his eyes. His head felt refreshed from the freezer still, his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day.”
-Joy Williams, “The Beach House”
“And here, the baptismal gowns of lost children, like limp little ghosts.”
-Kirstin Valdez Quade
“I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere.”
-Denis Johnson
“I still remembered the moment they first arrived, their spaceships burning the atmosphere like comets, like falling angels, and how we’d surrounded the ships in horror, aiming for their thin legs with anything we could find, because the rest of their bodies were armored but the legs snapped like pencils.”
-Brenda Peynado
“By the time we reached the Saekdal Beach, the sun peeked over the horizon like a cracked eyelid. Rocks glistened, clenched like obsidian fists.”
-Silvia Park
“He offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like holes that worms bore into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the way a glassblower turns a dollop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he then allowed time to flow like water at one mouth while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other.”
-Ted Chiang
“Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee.”
– E. M. Forster
“There are touches like bridles you can kick away, and then there are touches that startle you into temporary submission, like the universe catching its breath: body against stunned body, mind against bright mind. A sudden snare of recognition. Wildness regarding itself.”
-Amy Bonnaffons
“I washed my hands as if they were children, cradling first one and then the other.”
-Miranda July
“She has killed them, too, I thought, my mother. I saw their bodies stuffed into the well, white limbs bent like elephant tusks. I saw them hanging from the rafters in the attic, wrapped up in my mosquito net like flies. I saw my mother, straight-backed on the balcony with a cup of poisoned tea, the women retching out their innards in the garden below. That is what poison does to a person. A girl from school told me. She heard what my mother had tried to do.”
– Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
The Simile Museum 