Top 100 Simile Quotes
#1. I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.
Alan Garner
#2. How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? - from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born.
Edgar Allan Poe
#4. When you're looking around for metaphor or simile, I do think it's often helpful to keep inside the world of the book, to gather your comparisons from the stuff particular to that world - be they king salmon and aviation fuel, or pot roasts and spatulas.
Leigh Newman
#5. Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.
Salman Rushdie
#6. A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
Oscar Wilde
#7. The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.
Ned Beauman
#8. I went out on a date with Simile. I don't know what I metaphor.
Tim Vine
#10. I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. Graham's life is as tense as an overstretched simile.
Zane Stumpo
#12. And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.
David Mitchell
#13. My stern chase after time is, to borrow a simile from Tom Paine, like the race of a man with a wooden leg after a horse.
John Quincy Adams
#14. I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. I do not think we will have to wait for long.
Arthur C. Clarke
#15. To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who hits the line hard.
Theodore Roosevelt
#16. The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.
F.L. Lucas
#18. At its simplest, the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt to its precise application to tease the mind into active thought.
C. H. Dodd
#19. On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.
Northrop Frye
#21. The light of a lamp does not flicker in a windless place: that is the simile which describes a yogi of one-pointed mind, who meditates upon the Atman.
Swami Vivekananda
#22. Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.
Will Self
#23. The moon features frequently as a simile for beauty (and indeed Budur's name means 'moons'). Beautiful women are conventionally compared to gazelles. It was more common to evoke beauty through metaphor and simile than by close physical description.
Malcolm C. Lyons
#24. If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.
Ian Anderson
#25. A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.
George McWhirter
#26. For God himself the height of feeling free
Must have been His success in simile
When at sight of you He thought of me.
Robert Frost
#27. I think the Cold War works as a great analogy or simile for different kinds of conflict. It's funny, when you look back at it, it's one of the last times that the boundaries were clear. Now, as we see on 'Homeland,' there are no clear boundaries and enemies.
Matthew Rhys
#28. One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor.
Ogden Nash
#29. A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up.
James Geary
#30. .. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.
Mark Haddon
#31. He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.
Neil Gaiman
#32. I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. I want to be a metaphor.
China Mieville
#33. loved a man for years who said her eyes looked like the ocean, because she always wanted to be somebody's poem, somebody's simile, somebody's lackluster metaphor.
Trista Mateer
#34. A good simile,
as concise as a king's declaration of love.
Laurence Sterne
#35. In mainstream literature, a trope is a figure of speech: metaphor, simile, irony, or the like. Words used other than literally. In SF, a trope - at least as I understand the usage - is more: science used other than literally.
Edward M. Lerner
#36. How humid the heart, its messy rooms! We eat spicy food, sweat like wood and smolder like the coal mine that caught fire decades ago, yet still smokes more than my great-uncle who will not quit- or go out-
Kevin Young
#37. Girl: The kid buys a new tie and you curse him like he was Ramsay MacDonald.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#39. Laughter erupted from her belly and shot out her mouth like pigeons through an open cage door, schoolchildren bursting into summer vacation, water from a tapped hydrant.
Dennis Vickers
#40. Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after a rain
Zora Neale Hurston
#41. The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Edsger W. Dijkstra
#43. It was like hiking into a Hemingway story; everything was sepia-toned and bristling with subtext.
Leslie What
#44. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#45. Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.
Fiona Wood
#46. I felt like one of Apollo's sacred cows- slow, dumb, and bright red.
Rick Riordan
#47. 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.
Dennis Vickers
#48. T.H. moved through the forest like the melody of a well-known song, in perfect harmony with his surroundings.
Charles De Lint
#49. Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.
Chet Raymo
#50. He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition.
Haruki Murakami
#51. 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.
Stephen King
#52. There are three types of friends: those like food without which you can't live those like medicine which you need occasionally and those like an illness which you never want.
Solomon Ibn Gabirol
#53. The flesh of her butt jiggled like water-filled beach balls, oil drops dangling from a soupspoon, oversized Jell-O dessert cups.
Dennis Vickers
#54. 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,
#55. Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
Edward O. Wilson
#56. Rang in my ears like Easter morning churchbells in Rome, rumble from an unmuffled Harley, fireworks shells exploding over a Fourth-of-July parade.
Dennis Vickers
#57. I said I know my shot when I see it. Sometimes you don't even have to see it. Sometimes you feel it coming, screaming down the sky towards you like a meteor.
Tana French
#59. 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
#60. We're not moments, Megan, you and me. We're events. You say you might not be the same person you were a year ago? Well, who is? I'm sure not. We change, like swirling clouds around a rising sun.
Brandon Sanderson
#61. Eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting.
Thomas Hardy
#62. Roetown, of mixed economy, neither boom nor bust, just ordinary times - that is, hard - had a slightly run-down aspect, I suppose. But in a pleasing way, like a man you love who has buttoned his coat up wrong.
Yann Martel
#63. Smoked like it was fuel and he was going to get every last inch to the gallon.
Tana French
#65. The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock.
Katharine Graham
#66. I felt, by turns, numb, hot with a monstrous embarrassment, and sick as though I'd eaten splinters of glass and was slowly shredding inside.
Vanora Bennett
#67. His nostrils flared, he was breathing like a picadored bull.
Jerry Spinelli
#68. Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.
Dan Brown
#69. Poetry comes out of you like a pot of oatmeal boiling over.
Dennis Vickers
#70. 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
#71. Gleaming like a searchlight, Iowa moon, silver plate.
Dennis Vickers
#72. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.
John Green
#73. Faded like morning fog in the rising sun, sports team logo on a cheap T-shirt, ninety-nine dollar paint job on a Chevy.
Dennis Vickers
#74. Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during a operation.
Alexandra Kleeman
#75. Polish the young woman's ego like wax on a wood floor, Shinola on shoes, spit on an apple.
Dennis Vickers
#76. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.
John Connolly
#77. Above the front door the fanlight glowed blue, delicate as wing-bones.
Tana French
#78. My mind is a warehouse of carefully organized human emotions.
I lock away the things that do not serve me.
Tahereh Mafi
#80. High School is like a spork: it's a crappy spoon and a crappy fork, so in the end it's just plain useless.
John Mayer
#81. Our house was like sleeping beauties palace after the enchanted spell is cast
Karen Foxlee
#82. A house without books is like a room without windows.
Horace Mann
#83. It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.
Neil Gaiman
#84. Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.
Fulton J. Sheen
#85. Normal, in our house, is like a blanket too short for a bed
sometimes it covers you just fine, and other times it leaves you cold and shaking; and worst of all, you never know which of the two it's going to be.
Jodi Picoult
#86. Deep ridges crossed his forehead like terraces in a Thai hillside, tucks in a leather cushion, troughs across a bloodhound's jowls.
Dennis Vickers
#87. Detonations crash in from nearby like walls she's a void at the center of.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#88. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else's head.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#89. The wind blowing through my ripped clothes was so cold that I felt like a Percysicle.
Rick Riordan
#90. Vanished like inhibitions at a bachelorette party.
Dennis Vickers
#91. 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.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#92. 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.
Dexter Palmer
#93. 717! You are behaving like a demented bluebottle - stop that!
Laline Paull
#96. I was confused by this sudden glare of attention; it was as if the characters in a favorite painting, absorbed in their own concerns, had looked up out of the canvas and spoken to me.
Donna Tartt
#97. 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.
Olivia Sudjic
#99. Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift
#100. Some people are like Slinkies. They aren't really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to my face when I push them down a flight of stairs.
Patricia Briggs
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