Great Moments In Literature

Future Novelists… These are actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a thigh master.
• His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
• He spoke with wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
• She grew on him like E. coli and he was room temperature Canadian beef.
• She had a deep throaty genuine laugh like that sound a dog makes just before he throws up.
• Her vocabulary was as bad, as, like, whatever.
• He was a tall as a six foot three inch tree.
• The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge free ATM.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
• McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
• From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7 pm instead of 7:30.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
• The hailstones leaped up off the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
• Long separated by cruel fate, the star crossed lovers raced across a grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
• They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resemble Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the east river.
• Even in his last years, grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
• Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
• The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• Young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
• “Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.
• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a really duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a landmine or something.
• The Ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
• It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids with power tools.
• He was deeply in love when she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
• She was as easy as the TV guide crossword.
• Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• Her voice had that tense grating quality, like a generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightening.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.