7 Quotes Tagged: similes

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.

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.

The voice was cool, drawling, and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked about as hard to get as a haircut.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

...I was certain his anger would hang on to him like a turkle does to a fisherman's toe...

If you disagree with something, it's easier to say 'you suck' than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You're also safe that way from refutation. In this respect trolling is a lot like graffiti. Graffiti happens at the intersection of ambition and incompetence: people want to make their mark on the world, but have no other way to do it than literally making a mark on the world.

"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.