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."
Author: Alan Garner

2. "Dove troverete, ditemi, un amore simile al mio, un amore che né il tempo, né la lontananza, né la disperazione possono spegnere; un amore che si accontenta di un nastro smarrito, di uno sguardo perduto, di una parola sfuggita?"
Author: Alexandre Dumas

3. "«Non prevedo nulla di buono per la vostra razza», disse cupo Zoltan Chivay. «A questo mondo ogni creatura intelligente che cada in povertà, in miseria e in disgrazia è abituata a unirsi ai propri simili, perché insieme è più facile resistere ai tempi difficili, perché ci si aiuta a vicenda. Invece tra voi umani ognuno bada solo a come guadagnare sulla miseria altrui. Quando c'è una carestia non si divide il cibo, ma si mangiano i più deboli. Un procedimento del genere si riscontra fra i lupi, permette di sopravvivere agli esemplari più sani e più forti. Ma tra le razze intelligenti di solito una simile selezione permette di sopravvivere e di dominare ai peggiori figli di puttana. Traete da soli conclusioni e previsioni.»"
Author: Andrzej Sapkowski

4. "Sound is so important to creative writing. Think of the sounds you hear that you include and the similes you use to describe what things sound like. 'As she walked up the alley, her polyester workout pants sounded like windshield wipers swishing back and forth.' Cadence, onomatopoeia, the poetry of language are all so important. Learn all that you can about how to bring sound into your work."
Author: Barbara DeMarco Barrett

5. "Je suis vide. Je n'ai que gestes, réflexes, habitudes. Je veux me remplir. C'est pourquoi je psychanalyse les gens...Je n'assimile pas. Je leur prends leurs pensées, leurs complexes, leurs hésitations et rien ne m'en reste. Je n'assimile pas; ou j'assimile trop bien..., c'est la même chose. Bien sure, je conserve des mots, des contenants, des étiquettes; je connais les termes sous lesquels on range les passions, les émotions, mais je ne les éprouve pas."
Author: Boris Vian

6. "[T]he wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile."
Author: Charles Dickens

7. "True love was beyond the bars, but a facsimile of it came with no suffering at all."
Author: D. Morgenstern

8. "In effetti stamattina ho proprio versato tutte le lacrime che avevo in corpo. Sarebbe più giusto dire che il corpo ha versato tutte le lacrime accumulate dalla mente nel corso di quest'inverosimile carneficina. La quantità di sé che viene eliminata con le lacrime! Piangendo si fa molta più acqua che pisciando, ci si pulisce infinitamente meglio che tuffandosi nel lago più puro, si posa il fardello dello spirito sul marciapiede del binario d'arrivo. Una volta che l'anima si è liquefatta, si può celebrare il ricongiungimento con il corpo. Stanotte il mio dormirà bene. Ho pianto di sollievo, credo. [...] Onore alle lacrime!"
Author: Daniel Pennac

9. "Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you've never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks."
Author: Dave Cullen

10. "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."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe's Berenice

11. "When you write, it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers."
Author: Edwidge Danticat

12. "La verità reale è sempre inverosimile […]. Per rendere la verità più verosimile, bisogna assolutamente mescolarvi della menzogna."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

13. "Inside each of us resides the truth, I began, the absolute truth. But sometimes the truth is hidden in a hall of mirrors. Sometimes we believe we are viewing the real thing, when in fact we are viewing a facsimile, a distortion."
Author: Garth Stein

14. "- 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 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."
Author: George Orwell

15. "Ogni essere vivente, pensavo, agisce per istinto e l'unico modo per tenerlo sempre vivo nelnostro spirito, è quello di metterci in condizione di cavarcela da soli. Un po' come un animalecresciuto in cattività: se fosse riportato nel suo habitat naturale, rischierebbe di morire affamato,poiché non ha più l'istinto di cacciare. Così pensavo che anche negli esseri umani accadessequalcosa di simile e per autodifesa tendono ad allontanare chi minaccia di azzerare quell'istinto."
Author: Gianluca Frangella

16. "One ought to know everything, to write. All of us scribblers are monstrously ignorant. If only we weren't lacking in stamina, what a rich field of ideas and similes we could tap! Books that have been the source of entire literatures, like Homer and Rabelais, contain the sum of all the knowledge of their times. They knew everything, those fellows, and we know nothing."
Author: Gustave Flaubert

17. "Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!"
Author: Hilary Mantel

18. "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."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

19. "Dans la vie morale, aussi bien que dans la vie physique, il existe une aspiration et une respiration; l'âme a besoin d'absorber les sentiments d'une autre âme, de se les assimiler pour les lui restituer plus riches. Sans ce beau phénomène humain, point de vie au cœur; l'air lui manque alors, il souffre et dépérit."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

20. "This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army of the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensuing to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of with start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

21. "There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe."
Author: Horace Walpole

22. "A broken heart in real life isn't half as dreadful as it is in books. It's a good deal like a bad tooth, though you won't think THAT a very romantic simile. It takes spells of aching and gives you a sleepless night now and then, but between times it lets you enjoy life and dreams and echoes and peanut candy as if there were nothing the matter with it."
Author: L.M. Montgomery

23. "And now, from beneath the audible, came a low reverberation. It came up through the soles of my feet. I stood still while it hummed upward bone by bone. There is no adequate simile. The pulse of the country worked through my body until I recognized it as music. As language. And the language ran everywhere inside me, like blood; and for feeling, it was as if through time I had been made of earth or mud or other insensate matter. Like a rhyme learned in antiquity a verse blazed to mind: O be quick, my soul, to answer Him; be jubilant, my feet! And sure enough my soul leapt dancing inside my chest, and my feet sprang up and sped me forward, and the sense came to me of undergoing creation, as the land and the trees and the beasts of the orchard had done some long time before. And the pulse of the country came around me, as of voices lifted at great distance, and moved through me as I ran until the words came clear, and I sang with them a beautiful and curious chant."
Author: Leif Enger

24. "From authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence -- in Gibbon's polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla's command of the subjunctive, in Mailer's hyperbole and Dillard's similes, in Twain's invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world's colossal humbug . . . I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words."- from Harper's Notebook, November 2010"
Author: Lewis H. Lapham

25. "Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them—who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait."
Author: Margaret Atwood

26. "Ma... dirlo così... come potrei. Come si può valutare una cosa simile... il disonore?""Non dobbiamo valutare una cosa simile, signora. Deve dirmi che somma le piacerebbe avere."
Author: Marguerite Duras

27. ".. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile."
Author: Mark Haddon

28. "You interest me,' he said, and his tone suggested this fact itself surprised him, meant something more to him than perhaps it should: a man surprised by being interested was living a piss-poor facsimile of life, in her view."
Author: Meredith Duran

29. "Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all."
Author: Michael J. Fox

30. "Moriamo.Moriamo ricchi di amanti e di tribu`, di gusti che abbiamo inghiottito, di corpi che abbiamo penetrato risalendoli come fiumi, di paure in cui ci siamo nascosti come in questa caverna stregata senza memoria.Voglio che tutto cio` resti inciso sul mio corpo. Siamo noi i veri paesi,non le frontiere tracciate sulle mappe con i nomi di uomini potenti.Lo so che tornerai e mi porterai fuori di qui, nel palazzo dei venti.Non ho mai voluto altro che camminare in un luogo simile con te. Una terra senza mappe.La lampada si e` spenta, e sto scrivendo nell'oscurita`."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

31. "De plus en plus, les théories qui tentaient d'expliquer les phénomènes économiques, de prévoir leurs évolutions, lui apparaissaient a peu prés également inconsistantes, hasardeuses, elle était de plus en plus tentée de les assimiler a du charlatanisme pur et simple; il était même surprenant, se disait-elle parfois, qu'on attribue un prix Nobel d'économie, comme si cette discipline pouvait se prévaloir du même sérieux méthodologique, de la même rigueur intellectuelle que la chimie, ou que la physique."
Author: Michel Houellebecq

32. "Una strana fatalità sembra costringere ogni essere umano ad aggirarsi, simile ad un fantasma, nei luoghi dove qualche grave avvenimento ha lasciato un profondo solco nella vita di lui; e codesta fatalità è tanto più inesorabile, quanto più quel solco sia di tristezza e di dolore."
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

33. "La stella lasciò andare la catena. - Una volta lui mi ha catturato con una catena simile, ma poi mi ha liberato e io sono scappata via. Quando mi ha ritrovata mi ha legata a sé con un vincolo più forte di qualunque catena."
Author: Neil Gaiman

34. "He had gone beyond the world of metaphor & simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him."
Author: Neil Gaiman

35. "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."
Author: Norton Juster

36. "Ed è vero, no? – incredibile ma vero – che c'è gente che prova nella vita la disinvoltura, la fiducia in sé, la semplice ed essenziale sintonia con gli avvenimenti che io ero solito provare come esterno centro dei Seabees? Perché, vede, non si trattava di essere il miglior esterno centro, bensì solo di sapere con precisione, fino al più piccolo particolare, come dovesse comportarsi un esterno centro. E c'è gente simile che cammina per le strade degli USA? Le chiedo: perché non posso essere uno di loro? Perché non posso esistere adesso come esistevo per i Seabees là all'esterno centro?"
Author: Philip Roth

37. "Come se nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore ci fosse la purezza. Il cielo aiuti un simile scrittore! Come se Joyce non avesse annusato oscenamente le mutande di Nora. Come se nell'anima di Dostoevskij non avesse mai bisbigliato Svidrigailov. Nel cuore della natura di uno scrittore c'è il capriccio. Curiosità, fissazioni, isolamento, veleno, feticismo, austerità, leggerezza, perplessità, infantilismo eccetera. Il naso nella cucitura di un indumento intimo: ecco la natura dello scrittore. L'impurità."
Author: Philip Roth

38. "The main reason I became a teacher is that I like being the first one to introduce kids to words and music and people and numbers and concepts and idea that they have never heard about or thought about before. I like being the first one to tell them about Long John Silver and negative numbers and Beethoven and alliteration and "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning" and similes and right angles and Ebenezer Scrooge. . . Just think about what you know today. You read. You write. You work with numbers. You solve problems. We take all these things for granted. But of course you haven't always read. You haven't always known how to write. You weren't born knowing how to subtract 199 from 600. Someone showed you. There was a moment when you moved from not knowing to knowing, from not understanding to understanding. That's why I became a teacher."
Author: Phillip Done

39. "The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile."
Author: Robert Cormier

40. "Door in the Dark:In going from room to room in the dark,I reached out blindly to save my face,But neglected, however lightly, to laceMy fingers and close my arms in an arc.A slim door got in past my guard,And hit me a blow in the head so hardI had my native simile jarred.So people and things don't pair any moreWith what they used to pair with before."
Author: Robert Frost

41. "History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information."
Author: Robert Smithson

42. "Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument."
Author: Robert South

43. "Ancora, dopo tutto questo tempo, il Sole non ha mai detto alla Terra,"tu mi devi."Guarda cosa accade con un amore simileIllumina il cielo."
Author: Rumi

44. "Oh, come off it. That surly cunt is squirming like a snake." "Could there be some sort of Freudian symbolism in your choice of similes?""What?" "Forget it..."
Author: Stieg Larsson

45. "My mind is, to use a disgustingly obvious simile, like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores. I am feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience. I pass by people, grazing them on the edges, and it bothers me. I've got to admire someone to really like them deeply - to value them as friends. It was that way with Ann: I admired her wit, her riding, her vivacious imagination - all the things that made her the way she was. I could lean on her as she leaned on me. Together the two of us could face anything - only not quite anything, or she would be back. And so she is gone, and I am bereft for awhile. But what do I know of sorrow?"
Author: Sylvia Plath

46. "How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity."
Author: Thomas Hardy

47. "The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland must have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn't a trace of topsoil; only sand and clay. The Belgians call them 'clyttes', these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rains (which is almost constantly from early September through to March, except when it snows) the water rises at you out of the ground. It rises from your footprints-and an army marching over a field can cause a flood. In 1916, it was said that you 'waded to the front'. Men and horses sank from sight. They drowned in mud. Their graves, it seemed, just dug themselves and pulled them down."
Author: Timothy Findley

48. "A lacerare e lacerarsi ci vuole un attimo.La pelle tira, leggermente arrossata dai cerotti. Mi accarezzo e affiora un sorriso. Calore. Pace interna o una cosa simile. Mettere le cose al proprio posto. Le ferite che cicatrizzano sotto bendaggi maldestri tradiscono sempre. E allora, non guardatemi, vi prego non guardatemi, vi scongiuro non guardatemi.Non sono cose adatte a chi può respirare forte in un giorno di sole."
Author: Valentina Di Martino

49. "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."
Author: William Carlos Williams

50. "Ebbi allora il presagio che esiste al mondo una sorta di desiderio simile a un dolore lancinante."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Simile Quotes Pictures