Simile Quotes

“Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.”
― Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems

“As the station wagon pulled back onto the highway, the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon like a leaky boat. Well, except for that fact that boats are not generally round, orange and on fire. Hmm. Come to think of it, in no way whatsoever did the sun, in this instance, resemble a leaky boat. My apologies. That was a dreadful attempt at simile. Please allow me to try again.
As the station wagon pulled back onto the highway, the sun was slowly sinking below the horizon like a self-luminous, gaseous sphere comprised mainly of of hydrogen and helium.”
― Cuthbert Soup, A Whole Nother Story

“His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile.”
― Laini Talyor

“Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.”
― Mark Haddon (Author), The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.”
― Chet Raymo, Honey From Stone: A Naturalist's Search for God

“It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Mori smiled properly. The lines around his eyes were deeper than usual now. They made him look like an old photograph of a young man, often crushed, but ironed carefully so that only the ghosts of the marks remained.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Augustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him speaking slowly clearly bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Indian summer is like a woman.”
― Grace Metalious, Peyton Place

“Our house was like sleeping beauties palace after the enchanted spell is cast”
― Karen Foxlee, The Anatomy of Wings

“Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place

“In the hazy afternoon light through the windows he looked beautiful and dissolute, shirt open at the collar and streaks of golden hair falling into his eyes, like some Regency buck after a long night's dancing.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Metaphors, similes, and analogies sharpen the sword of our writing. They allow us to cut quickly through the fat to the meat of our purpose (p. 146).”
― Andrew T. Le Peau, Write Better: A Lifelong Editor on Craft, Art, and Spirituality

“One by one the ponds gulped down their ice like big, painful pills.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“And so it turned out that Ove became a night cleaner instead. And if this hadn't happened, he would never have come off his shift that morning and caught sight of her. With those red shoes and the gold brooch and all her burnished brown hair. And that laughter of hers, which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“I fear for those innocent people. They're like butterflies on an anvil, waiting for a hammer to come down.”
― Katherine Applegate

“She quaffs tea with the air of a sailor drinking whiskey.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, 100 Countryside Scenes Adult Coloring Book: An Adult Coloring Book Featuring 100 Amazing Coloring Pages with Beautiful Beautiful Flowers, and Romantic ... Countryside Landscapes

“The two of them talked in medical babble while I sat there feeling as useful as a gorilla at a spelling bee.”
― Renae Kaye, The Shearing Gun

“Her life was as different from mine as chalk from cheese. In a way, it was fascinating to hear about it, but it sounded stultifying to me.”
― Agatha Christie, Endless Night

“My heart caught like a fish in the breathy net of his voice”
― Kim Culbertson, Catch a Falling Star

“Since that time, he had been running from deadlines and the concept of writing in general like it was an angry bear on an electric bike.”
― Maureen Johnson, Nine Liars

“For as an essential characteristic of the formula is repeat, an essential of simile is uniqueness.”
― RIchmond Lattimore (Translation), The Iliad of Homer

“Simile, with its relatives, is as essential to Homer as formula. It has been more frequently noticed, but even more seriously misunderstood. Simile in Homer is not decoration; it is dynamic invention, and because of this no successor has been able to swing it in the same grand manner.”
― RIchmond Lattimore (Translation), The Iliad of Homer

“The purpose of a simile is to encourage the listener's imagination by likening something in the narrative of the heroic past to something which is directly within his own experience; and so the majority of Homeric similes are drawn from everyday life. This means, that they, like Akhilleus' shield, give us a view of the world lying beyond the war, the world that existed in the poet's own day and long after him.”
― Geoffrey S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume 5: Books 17-20

“We can make the most of the Earth and benefit from its beauty, but in such a way that we respect the Earth, just as a bee respects the flower.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

“I stand between them in the elevator like we’re three mismatched garden gnomes.”
― Sabrina Fedel, All Roads Lead to Rome

“His steel cut through the solid armor like scissors to paper, breaking the rules of rock beating scissors.”
― Daniel Varona, The Cycle of Eden: The Young Revolution