Similes Quotes

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

“There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté.”
― Margaret Atwood , Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.
You have never spoken before.”
― China Miéville, Embassytown

“and her skin shone luminous and impossibly pale, as if it drank light from the moon.”
― Madeline Miller

“[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.”
― Paul Graham

“It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“Inside plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“Sometimes it can be as brutally overwhelming as a tidal wave flooding every orifice, the suffocation, the pressure, the immensity of this damnable depression like an ocean, unsurmountable. It swallows me whole and gnaws at my very bones. It floods me over and over, drowning me over and over... It is a torturous broken record player with a scratched disc on repeat, the wailing disrupting any possible good remaining after the tsunami. It wails and wails inside my ribcage and inside my skull. I cannot make it stop.”
― Moonshine Noire

“When he came down, he was slower, and clutching something his hand. He leapt down the last 5 feet or so and came over to me, uncurling his fingers. In his palm was something trembling and silky and the bright, delicious pale gold of apples; in the gloom of the jungle it looked like light itself. Uva nudged the thing with a finger and it turned over, and I could see it was a monkey of some sort, though no monkey I had ever seen before; it was only a few inches larger than one of the mice I had once been tasked with killing, and his face was a wrinkled black heart, its features pinched together but its eyes large and as blankly blue as a blind kitten's. It had tiny, perfectly formed hands, one of which was gripping its tail, which it had wrapped around itself and which was flamboyantly furred, its hair hanging like a fringe.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees

“The train's doors closed with a matron's shush.”
― Kevin Ansbro, The Fish That Climbed a Tree

“Genghis Miliband roars up to the despatch box like a caged donkey.”
― Andy Zaltzman

“To my mind, it’s one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it’s good.”
― Brad Leithauser

“Questions swirled in my brain like terrified bait minnows in a bucket.”
― Julian May, The Sagittarius Whorl

“A place where a clock's minute and hour hands spread away from its face, flapping like wings. A place where he'd pluck a daisy and watch the petals whirl like the propellers of a helicopter. Where he'd throw a handful of sand, and the grains would buzz away like a swarm of gnats. Where colorful fruits on a tree would burst into flight, and new ones would perch in their place.”
― Michelle Cuevas, Beyond the Laughing Sky

“Inaccurate similes and metaphors have the effect of deflecting the reader’s attention from the story to the words on the page. Yet when carried off, especially when a simile is original and a metaphor sings, there is no greater glory in the practice of words.”
― Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: A Master Editor of Some of the Most Successful Writers of Our Century Shares His Craft Techniques and Strategies

“Talking to Reagan was like standing in front of an oncoming train.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“The sky seemed abruptly to have had enough of my dithering and dramatically lightened up around the glowing moon, which retreated like an aging sovereign before the rising sun.”
― Mary Ellen Hannibal, Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction

“...the book like a sleigh left my lap...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“the book like a sleigh left my lap”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Though words sometimes puzzled Alma, she never looked up any word in any dictionary; a word was like a pebble to be turned briefly in the hand, and tossed away, with no expectation that it would be encountered again.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, The Tattooed Girl

“Similes, are all names of good and evil; they do not speak out, they only hint. A fool who seeketh knowledge from them!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Andy: ugh I’ve never felt so old and slimy.
Sinter: You’re 25. That isn’t old to a 19 year old
Andy: Old. And slimy. Slimy like a slug. Like seaweed.
Sinter: Are you done with your metaphors
Andy: I think these are similes

Though he’d been a computer science major, he’d also been, like me, an English minor. It made him remarkably hot at moments such as this.

Sinter: Right, you’re right
Andy: And no. There are many slimy things and I’m like them all. Slimy like mayo
Sinter: Gross
Andy: Exactly, I am gross
Sinter: Ha no, mayo is gross
Andy: Slimy like a dog’s tongue.
Sinter: Seriously stop.”
― Molly Ringle, All the Better Part of Me

“In the room splashed with golden autumn light, they had drawn together, as close as eggs in a nest.”
― Jan Karon, A Light in the Window

“The train’s doors closed with a matron’s shush.”
― Kevin Ansbro, The Fish That Climbed a Tree

“She stuck out in Argameri like the proverbial dick in the hotdog bowl.”
― eden Hudson, Jubal Van Zandt & the Revenge of the Bloodslinger

“Their great love, in which she lived totally immersed, seemed to be subsiding around her, like the river sinking into its bed...and she could see the mud at the bottom.”
― Gustave Flaubert, ( Miss ) Madame Bovary

“The Meyricks had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well as the father's, their minds being like mediaeval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps and sudden outlooks.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda