Quotes About Simile

I regard St. Mary Mead," he said authoritatively, "as a stagnant pool." He looked at us, prepared for resentment at his statement, but somewhat, I think, to his chagrin, no one displayed annoyance. "That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond," said Miss Marple briskly. "Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.

I'll buy metaphor, but simile's a cop-out used by scaredycats who won't commit to anything. Simile's for cowards.

These tanks were like a good rent-a-car.

Still passing through the same desolate country, we see that he makes a note on the forsaken fields and the watch-towers in them. Cucumbers are cultivated in large quantities by the natives of Inner Africa, and the reader will no doubt call to mind the simile adopted by Isaiah some 2500 years ago, as he pictured the coming desolation of Zion, likening her to a "lodge in a garden of cucumbers.

One simile that solitary shinesIn the dry desert of a thousand lines.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.But that's just our simile.The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,his news inhuman.

although metaphor undoubtedly deals in likenesses, similarity, it also deals in unlikeness and dissimilarity.

For God himself the height of feeling free Must have been His success in simile When at sight of you He thought of me.

Gli uccelli allevati in isolamento, che non hanno mai visto un loro simile, nella maggior parte dei casi non <> a quale specie appartengono, e perciò il loro istinto sociale e il loro desiderio sessuale si rivolgono verso le creature con le quali hanno trascorso determinate fasi evolutive particolarmente importanti: quindi, nella maggior parte dei casi, vero l'uomo.

To grasp the implications of the comparison—the term "parable" comes from the Greek para, "along side, together with," as in "parallel" or "paradox," and balo, "to cast," "to throw"—we need to understand the nuances of each side of the equation. We immediately realize that, with such comparisons, no single meaning can ever be determined, just as no single metaphor or simile can be restricted.

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.

Tu sais, Papa, que les femmes pleurent comme les enfants pissent?

Poetry is dying first. It'll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that's never been beautiful before.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

Coincidence, if you'll permit the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.

It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble.

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.

An analogy says that A is to B as C is to D. A metaphor says that A is B, or substitutes B for A. A simile says that A is like B.

The American Heritage Dictionary definition says a metaphor is "an implicit comparison." This unusual term is used for one reason, and one reason only: to distinguish it from a simile, which makes an explicit—or direct—comparison.

If a poet falls in a forest, and there's nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile?

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, It rained very hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty. I went upstairs and sat in my room and watched the water falling in the street. It was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks (and this is a simile, too, not a metaphor). P.103

1 This is not a metaphor, it is a simile, which means that it really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils and if you make a picture in your head of a man with two very small mice hiding in his nostrils you will know what the police inspector looked like. And a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.