Simile Quotes & Sayings

Today was a very cold and bitter day, as cold and bitter as a cup of hot chocolate, if the cup of hot chocolate had vinegar added to it and were placed in a refrigerator for several hours. — Lemony Snicket

I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split. — Raymond Chandler

Her brown eyes flashed like headlamps on a police cruiser, cameras at a Superbowl kickoff, lightning over Frankenstein's
castle. — Dennis Vickers

Childlike wonder and awe have died. The scenery and poetry and music of the majesty of God have dried up like a forgotten peach at the back of the refrigerator. — John Piper

Could be an amazing product, sell like condoms at a high school prom, donuts at a police convention, sunscreen on a Caribbean crush ship. — Dennis Vickers

She wishes her grandmother had not been so protective, and that she understood better what passes between a man and woman. As it is, she simply enjoys the feelings and wonders if they are what lightning is made of, for everything comes back to the weather. Tears like rain. Smiles like the sun. Hair as dry as sand and fear like the dark ocean. — Sara Sheridan

His lips made a grim twist that was like the joyless cousin of a smile. — Laini Taylor

It's no use telling us that something was 'mysterious' or 'loathsome' or 'awe-inspiring' or 'voluptuous.' By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel-melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, we readers, not you, exclaim, 'how mysterious!' or 'loathsome' or whatever it is. Let me taste for myself, and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react. — C.S. Lewis

Her courage seemed to collapse around her ankles like an old pair of elastic undies — Julie Anne Grasso

Love is like a booger, you pick and pick at it. Then when you get it you wonder how to get rid of it. — Mae West

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

My body felt like tangled rubber bands and dried-out pens and sticky paper clips, like the contents of a drawer where you put the things you don't have anywhere else to put, and I knew that the mind and body are connected, and that my bodily sensations were just messages from my mind, but I just wished there was a box or a drawer or a hole in the ground where I could put all this, all this mind and body stuff that I didn't know what else to do with. — Catherine Lacey

Life is like a box of Hand grenades,You never know what will blow you to kingdom come — Mario Puzo

Your eyes flash like Fourth-of-July sparklers, headlights on a mountain road, sparks in a short-circuited toaster. — Dennis Vickers

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. — Olivia Sudjic

She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest. — Alexandra Kleeman

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

My own conscious ideal has been to delude the reader into accepting an impossibility, or series of impossibilities, by means of a sort of verbal black magic, in the achievement of which I make use of prose-rhythm, metaphor, simile, tone-color, counter-point, and other stylistic resources, like a sort of incantation. — Clark Ashton Smith

He was looking at me like I was a very nice thing of his that wasn't working quite like it should, like he'd found a defect, a defect that was extremely disappointing because he had spent a lot of time doing his research and believed he had gotten a thing that was guaranteed against these kinds of defects, and maybe there was some kind of glitch in the system and maybe he needed to have a professional assess the situation, give him an estimate. — Catherine Lacey

Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing. — Abraham Lincoln

It was darker than a carload of assholes. — George V. Higgins

...as vivid and fabulous as a unicorn... — Anne Rivers Siddons

An anxious heart is like a string that's out of tune. — Naguib Mahfouz

Love is like the human appendix. You take it for granted while it's there, but when it's suddenly gone you're forced to endure horrible pain that can only be alleviated through drugs. — Reverend Jen

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

He's like a drug for you, Bella. — Stephenie Meyer

She had the world's worst poker face: her feelings floated across them like reflections on a still pond. — Jojo Moyes

Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag. — Chet Raymo

Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter. — Lemony Snicket

His nostrils flared, he was breathing like a picadored bull. — Jerry Spinelli

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

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

A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open. — Frank Zappa

To explain the matter I will employ a simile, which yet, I confess is very dissimilar; but its dissimilitude is greatly in favour of my sentiments. A rich man bestows, on a poor and famishing beggar, alms by which he may be able to maintain himself and his family. Does it cease to be a pure gift, because the beggar extends his hand to receive it? Can it be said with propriety, that 'the alms depended partly on THE LIBERALITY of the Donor, and partly on THE LIBERTY of the Receiver,' though the latter would not have possessed the alms unless he had received it by stretching out his hand? Can it be correctly said, BECAUSE THE BEGGAR IS ALWAYS PREPARED TO RECEIVE, that 'he can have the alms, or not have it, just as he pleases?' If these assertions cannot be truly made about a beggar who receives alms, how much less can they be made about the gift of faith, for the receiving of which far more acts of Divine Grace are required! — James Arminius

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel. — Dan Brown

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 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. — Jasper Fforde

I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food. — David Nicholls

Verbal imagery (such as a simile or a description of a place or an event) is more physical, more bodily, than thinking or feeling, but less physical, more internal, than the actual sounds of the words. Imagery takes place in "the imagination," which I take to be the meeting place of the thinking mind with the sensing body. What is imagined isn't physically real, but it feels as if it were: the reader sees or hears or feels what goes on in the story, is drawn into it, exists in it, among its images, in the imagination (the reader's? the writer's?) while reading. — Ursula K. Le Guin

You see, it's really quite simple. A simile is just a mode of comparison employing 'as' and 'like' to reveal the hidden character or essence of whatever we want to describe, and through the use of fancy, association, contrast, extension, or imagination, to enlarge our understanding or perception of human experience and observation. — Norton Juster

His touch was like a bard's on his instrument, and it awakened a deep and mysterious music in my body. — Juliet Marillier

Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you'd see. — Lemony Snicket

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts ... for support rather than illumination. — Andrew Lang

Nadine found herself standing in front of a row of streaming faces, like waxworks of forgotten celebrities being melted down before coming back as more contemporary figures. — Pascal Garnier

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

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. — Hanya Yanagihara

The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying. — Ursula K. Le Guin

He gripped her so tightly she could barely breathe. Then he let go. He did it as if he was forcing himself, as if he were starving and he was putting aside the last piece of food he had. But he did it. — Cassandra Clare

Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it. — Nicholas Sparks

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

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming ... and a little mad. — Alfred North Whitehead

The patches are the stories. Hold onto that. And the muddy zigzag of ducktape against the cracked doorglass. There's four kids who sleep here, a nuff for the fingers on each otherses hands. There's room in each of them for one important thing. They're a band. It's not they're in a band. They're a band. Four spikes of ducktape, up and down, like mountain peaks or a sawblade. Every band's got a sign, something to sew on your jacket, gouge on the wall at a show. Four spikes up and down say MEATHEADS, and you picked a fucked window to knock at, tourist. They're the best band in the world. — Noah Wareness

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle. — Oscar Wilde

When I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. Filling pages and people with inspiration. When my thoughts don't want to rest on a page, we argue. We argue that one merely is ready just too comfortable playing in The Nile [denial] river. So we compromise. We grow,
water metaphors
and plant simile trees
of golden-almond
manifested love dreams.
Then at that moment, we forgot what we were arguing about.
Beauty can do that for you.
That's the beauty of writing. — Antonia Perdu

From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for mathematics, and his intimate intermingling of intellect and mysticism. — Bertrand Russell

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

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children's librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I'll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid. — John Green

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

Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one ... like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart ... and one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging. — Eleanor Catton

She crooned on until her cigarette was gone. The ash in the wind blew around us like hesitant snow. — Hannah Lillith Assadi

[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile. — Charles Dickens

How would it alter Juliet's love perception to learn the sea is but a rounded jug of water? Would her sensuous analogy turned simple simile unveil to her the limits of herself? Or would she forget the ocean, that deplorable casket, and turn on the true bottomless tumbler, the only running tap: the sky? It may have lost the title 'heavens' when its gods were dethroned, but its infinity reigns. So long as you walk, it reigns. So long as I talk and you listen, there's a voice and ears to keep it active, moving, and reason to say: look! infinity lives. And when we and the other consciousnesses pass, though it in part dies with us, still it reigns. It will, in a sense, plod on, like a lifeless coffin through its own space, sails set for nothing, unstoppable when trailing its fabric. — Richard Ronald Allan

If she were here I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off her. I would hold her so close she'd beg me to let her breathe. I'd kiss her so hard she'd plead for mercy. I'd unfasten her clothing and lie with her on that hard bed, and what was between us would be as far above the ordinary congress between man and woman as the stars are above their pale reflections in the lake below. — Juliet Marillier

Screamed like a manic cheerleader heaping encouragement on her high school's punt returner as he breaks through the first wall of blocks. — Dennis Vickers

To me, it appears no unjust simile to compare the affairs of this great Continent to the mechanism of a clock, each state representing some one or other of the smaller parts of it which they are endeavoring to put in fine order without considering how useless & unavailing their labor is unless the great Wheel or Spring which is to set the whole in motion is also well attended to & kept in good order. — George Washington

Life, he realize, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile. — Nicholas Sparks

And now, my poor old woman, why are you crying so bitterly? It is autumn. The leaves are falling from the trees like burning tears- the wind howls. Why must you mimic them? — Mervyn Peake

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

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito
out! Every simile that would have made sub-moron's mouth twitch
gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer
lost!
Every story slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like
in the finale
Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant's attention
shot dead. — Ray Bradbury

Without inspiration, we're all like a box of matches that will never be lit. — David Archuleta

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

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

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 prayerless Christian is like a bus driver trying alone to push his bus out of a rut because he doesn't know Clark Kent is on board. — John Piper

The company's stock dropped like seagull turds on a car hood, panties on prom night, celebrity names during red-carpet coverage. — Dennis Vickers

I just don't like the idea of going down that hole tomorrow with this thing hanging over you and me like..." She stopped and struggled for a good simile.
"Like an open airplane storage locker?" I offered.
(...)
"I like the 'open airplane storage compartment' thing better. It means there's a journey with lots of baggage."
"And things being balanced precariously," I added.
"And a lack of closure," she said.
"Ok," I admitted. "I could start bullshitting about frequent flier miles or something, but I cant really think of any more good ones. — Elliott James

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

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. — Alexandra Kleeman

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

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

Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child. — Matthew De Abaitua

Poetic simile was strictly limited to statements like 'his mighty steed was as fleet as the wind on a fairly calm day, say about Force Three,' and any loose talk about a beloved having a face that launched a thousand ships would have to be backed by evidence that the object of desire did indeed look like a bottle of champagne. — Terry Pratchett

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it? — Mark Twain

You were sizzling, like sausages in a frying pan. — Kristina Adams

Like a lamp, dispelling the darkness of ignorance — Dalai Lama XIV

Thighs spread out on the seat like water balloons, frying eggs, spilled syrup. — Dennis Vickers

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

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like. — Lemony Snicket

And than suddenly he was there, charging down the hallway like death in a cowboy duster. — Richelle Mead

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

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. — Olivia Sudjic

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. — China Mieville

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable - and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach. — David Brin

Vanished like inhibitions at a bachelorette party. — Dennis Vickers

And then it hits me like a fast, open-palmed, stinging smack in the face.
Having a ghost boyfriend
WAS
weird — Lisa Schroeder

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,

Girl: The kid buys a new tie and you curse him like he was Ramsay MacDonald. — Vladimir Mayakovsky

A simile, to be perfect, must both illustrate and ennoble the subject; must show it to the understanding in a clearer view, and display it to the fancy with greater dignity; but either of these qualities may be sufficient to recommend it ... That it may be complete, it is required to exhibit, independently of its references, a pleasing image; for a simile is said to be a short episode. — Samuel Johnson

Disappeared like fog in a stiff morning breeze, teen revilers when a squad car creeps up the driveway, roaches when the kitchen light comes on. — Dennis Vickers