Best 222 quotes in «simile quotes» category

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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 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 very shapes of the trees were like frozen screams.

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

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

They . . . had been slugging it out like Rihanna and Chris Brown on repeat . . .

They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the moskovett, that bitter blast, that colossus of cold air that blows on our eastern shores throughout March, and then one morning you hear the birds, and the flags hang flaccid, and the outlines of the world are again in place.

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.

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

T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.

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

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.

Vanished like inhibitions at a bachelorette party.

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.

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.

Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking? Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr. Grene, lest I give him only imaginings. Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.

Washed-out like last year’s swimsuit.

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

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

When I was small my mother tried to teach me the colors. "Blue," she said, pointing to the sky. And "blue" again, the second time pointing to the water. She told me I shook my head because I could see that sky blue was not always the same as water blue. It took me a long time-until I lived in Oria- to use the same word for all the shades of a color... Love has different shades. Like the way I loved Cassia when I thought she'd never love me. The way I loved her on The Hill. The way I love her now that she came into the canyon for me. It's different. Deeper. I thought I loved her and wanted her before, but as we walk through the canyon together I realize this could be more than a new shade. A whole new color.

Whatever it was went through me like a rifle rag. Come dawn, me date was so hot you could have lit a sparkplug off of it.

When I read it now it's like I have broken into a reality that is not mine, and when I step out of it, as if I had removed my headphones and heard the city again, it is easy to close the door behind me.

You are nothing like my father. And like my father you are nothing.

When she did walk, to the bathroom between the chairs and the customers leaning back in them, oblivious to her manoeuvres, the sight felt strangely moving and profound, like a baby, or a veteran getting out of a wheelchair, or a deer in snow. That is perhaps overdoing it. Maybe I didn't quite know that at the time, but it was striking. If you have not seen a deer in snow, I mean: moving with precision, but as if she might leap away in a completely different direction at any moment.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Yes, boys are a little like shoes. Why? Well...They can be useful. But mainly...They are nice to look at. Getting the right one can be a lovely accessory to an outfit. There are times when you couldn't do without them. And there are times when you'd rather do without them. Get the wrong ones and they can hurt. There are many types and often the ones that look the nicest are completely unpractical.

Wrinkles appeared and disappeared as he squinted his eyes and relaxed them, like someone peering into a strobe light, police car-top beacon, flashing neon beer sign.

You know, a cell phone's like a guy; if you don't plug him in every night, charge him good, you got nothing at all.

Your lies are like a silent fart. Can't see 'em, but I can smell 'em.