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One has to regard a man as a Master who can produce on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to every page.
Sep 10, 2025
He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.
The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.
Life is like a simile.
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.
People are like music, some speak the truth and others are just noise.
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.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Insanity hovered close at hand, like an eager waiter at an expensive restaurant.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.
One thing that literature would be greatly the better for Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and>metaphor.
He'd felt like a jack-o-lantern for the past few days, as if his guts had been yanked out with a fork and dumped in a heap while a grinning smile stayed plastered on his face.
Like a lamp, dispelling the darkness of ignorance
A simile is like a pair of eyeglasses, one side sees this, one side sees that, the device brings them together.
I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.
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.
You don't have to get it right the first time.
Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.
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.
The wind blowing through my ripped clothes was so cold that I felt like a Percysicle.
Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.
A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest
Looking for an entirely reliable informant is like looking for a chaste mistress.
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.
London opens to you like a novel itself. [...] It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.
And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.
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.
Good similes depend upon close observation. They depend upon brevity and wit....They have to fit in context.
Love is like a booger, you pick and pick at it. Then when you get it you wonder how to get rid of it.
We come to the New Testament, where again a host of imperative verbs is mustered in support of that miserable bondage of free-choice, and the aid of carnal Reason with her inferences and similes is called in, just as in a picture or a dream you might see the King of the flies with his lances of straw and shields of hay arrayed against a real and regular army of seasoned human troops. That is how the human dreams of Diatribe go to war with the battalions of divine words.
It sounded like a piece of blackboard being dragged over the nails of a wall of severed fingers.
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.
A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.
O, my luve is like a red, red rose.
Oh my luve's like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June; Oh my luve's like the melodie That's sweetly played in tune.
Every one is fond of comparing himself to something great and grandiose, as Louis XIV likened himself to the sun, and others have had like similes. I am more humble. I am a mere street scavenger (chiffonier) of science. With my hook in my hand and my basket on my back, I go about the streets of science, collecting what I find.
I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.
Coffee falls into the stomach... ideas begin to move, things remembered arrive at full gallop... the shafts of wit start up like sharp-shooters, similes arise, the paper is covered with ink...
Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.
I felt like one of Apollo's sacred cows- slow, dumb, and bright red.
As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.
God has neither form nor shape under which we can know Him; when he speaks of Himself in metaphors and similes, He is adapting Himself to our foolishness, our limited capacity.
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
It is a curious fact, but a fact it is, that your witty people are the most hard-hearted in the world. The truth is, fancy destroys feeling. The quick eye to the ridiculous turns every thing to the absurd side; and the neat sentence, the lively allusion, and the odd simile, invest what they touch with something of their own buoyant nature. Humor is of the heart, and has its tears; but wit is of the head, and has only smiles - and the majority of those are bitter.
Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.