Best 222 quotes in «simile quotes» category

Some comparisons are comparable to comparing apples and oranges’ seeds.

Spring came down hard that year. And I do mean hard, like the fist of some drunken pike poker with too much fury and not enough ale, whose wife just left him for some wandering minstrel and whose commanding officer absconded with his pay.

Squeal like a cheerleader named prom queen, aging retiree placing the game-winning bingo button, frenzied fan finding Johnny Depp in her supermarket.

Studied all year and wrote in my journal like a nun works a Rosary, dog with a new bone, bee in his hive’s back room.

Suddenly, she emitted a loud, long fart, like air escaping a beach ball, exhaust pipe of a Model T, tire-inflating hose at the service station, and this without any forewarning borborygmus.

Sweating like a fat woman in a sauna, nun with a tattoo on her tit, overweight jockey.

The classroom fell quiet, a long heavy silence that roared in Roy's ears like a train.

That night I dreamt about the roses laid at the wrong feet—the feet of the nurse. Each bit of the dream was like a hyperlink. I pressed on one, wanting answers, and it took me to another. I could never get to the meaning at the bottom of any of the bits. When I reached for the petals of the roses, I was touching a metal seatbelt buckle in a coach, driving by night through a remote place, with a band of mist running parallel to the glass I leant against.

The amount of perfume she had on was like a human sacrifice on Incense Night.

The church trembled and the hail hammered the roof, but his words glided in the air, joyful and bright like the birds at the cliffs. They floated freely around one another without colliding and the wind carried them high up into heaven.

The conversation burned off like fog in sunlight.

The fog tore apart, light charged the sea like blue neon.

The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.

The flesh of her butt jiggled like water-filled beach balls, oil drops dangling from a soupspoon, oversized Jell-O dessert cups.

Then the nurse did turn to glance, and then stare—actually stare—at me. His look made me feel as if I was green, or whistling, or dead.

The kid poured him another straight rye and I think he doctored it with water down behind the bar because when he came up with it he looked as guilty as if he'd kicked his grandmother.

The life of man is like the life of a blade of grass. Death comes, the grass withers, and behold life ends, and the flower falls of all greatness and all worldly goods.

Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.

... the part in her black hair glowing like a wire in the rhomboid of sunlight.

Then she spotted in the corner, glowing wonderfully, a Wurlitzer jukebox. ' Holy shit!' It was like being on a commuter train through the Bronx and seeing among the piles of crushed cars a pasture with a lone white horse.

The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.

The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there.

The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.

The poems that used to entrance me in the days of Miss Violence now struck me as overdone and sickly. Alas, burthen, thine, cometh, aweary—the archaic language of unrequited love. I was irritated with such words, which rendered the unhappy lovers—I could now see—faintly ridiculous, like poor moping Miss Violence herself. Soft-edged, blurry, soggy, like a bun fallen into the water. Nothing you'd want to touch,

The previous Friday, Andy had come over, and they'd told him, and Andy had stood and hugged them both very solemnly, as if he was Jude's father and they had told him that they had just gotten engaged.

The study of Scripture I find to be quite like mastering an instrument. No one is so good that they cannot get any better; no one knows so much that they can know no more. A professional can spot an amateur or a lack of practice or experience a mile away. His technicality, his spiritual ear is razor-sharp. He is familiar with the common mistakes, the counter-arguments; and insofar as this, he can clearly distinguish the difference between honest critics of the Faith and mere fools who criticize that which they know nothing.

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.

There are times when any amount of being within the world is like rubbing bare skin against sandpaper, when any form of motion is a kind of abrasion, leaving you raw and pink and vulnerable to the next thing. At these times I prefer to close my eyes and be still, still like the cups or candles or crackers on the table, nerveless and open. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the thing furthest from my situation.

There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now. But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.

The sky wraps us in a chilled blanket of milky stars.

The sky was always full of birdsong and evening smells, piano music from a window, the stone buildings glowing against the blue, like cream poured over something tart and hot.

The spent shell come out the .243 shining like a bright idea.

The very shapes of the trees were like frozen screams.

The wrath of God is never an evil wrath. God gets angry because he loves people like a mother would love her child if someone were to harm it. There is something wrong if the mother never gets angry; it is safe to say that that is the unloving mother.

The words bounced off her like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake. A stone may skip a long way, but it always sinks eventually.

The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

The words were clumsy in my mouth, like typing with hammers.

They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.

Things which had at first felt like signs, if I analysed them for too long, ended up feeling like the movements of my own reflection in dark glass.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something I had not experienced with any other woman.

This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.

Time unlived grows old Like unworn robes in a locked chest.

Tourists hurried past them on the pedestrian-only street like chickens scampering to the feeder, cars scurrying through a tollgate, Niagara River rushing into the falls.

Washed-out like last year’s swimsuit.

We topped a rise just then, and the moor stretched out ahead of us, silvery-white and rustling, like a wide ghostly sea. In the distance lay Grimsgrave Hall, black and hulking as a ship adrift on moonlit waves.

We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.

We were a bit like bacon and eggs, where y'know, the chicken is involved, but the pig is really committed? I totally gave myself to it just as we promised, "for better or worse", and you didn't see it like that.

Whacked away under the desk like hail on a barn roof.