Ready For Takeoff

"Clean and smooth like a tar runway, his forehead sloped sharply down and out." (Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien)

Record Store Blues

The violence of Portland licked right up to the edge of the store and left a spew like that yellow foam on city beaches where old rubber dries out with jellyfish and whiskey bottles and the dead squid. (The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer)

Shackled and Drunk

The only sound in the messhall was Harrogate struggling to free himself from the table. Wilson was standing over him like a faith healer over a paraplegic. (Suttree by Cormac McCarthy)

Roofing

Slusser turned toward the guards in a half crouch and they fell upon him with slapsticks flailing...The slapsticks were going whop whop whop, Slusser on the floor with just the pick sticking out, the guards hammering away from kneeling positions like carpenters on a roof. (Suttree by Cormac McCarthy)

City Moon

Above the heat and the improbable skyline of the city a brass moon has risen and the clouds run before it like watered ink. (Suttree by Cormac McCarthy)

Jumpin' Bean

"Well, Pa seen him, an' Pa, he figgers he's the bes' Jesus-jumper in these parts. So Pa picks out a feeny bush 'bout twicet as big as Uncle John's feeny bush, and Pa lets out a squawk like a sow litterin' broken bottles, an' he takes a run at that feeny bush an' clears her an' bust his right leg." (Character speaking: Casy, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath)

Lee the Wiser

"All right then--I'm going to try to pull out your thoughts like egg noodles and let them dry in the sun." (John Steinbeck from East of Eden)

Picture Perfect

Her blond hair framed her face like crabgrass does flagstone. (The Bayou Trilogy by Daniel Woodrell.) 

The Big Gulp

The back of his head and his sternum ached, the wolfed-down Egg McMuffin shifted at the bottom of his stomach like a shipwreck on the ocean floor. (The Inquisitor by Mark Allen Smith.)  

I Do It For The Glory

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning towards dynamite. (John Steinbeck from East of Eden)

Slipping Away

And he lay very quietly and tried to hold onto himself that he felt slipping away from himself as you feel snow starting to slip sometimes on a mountain slope . . . (Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls)

The Wiki Metropolis: Leaves, Ancient Ruins & Some Hairy Caterpillars

It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks. (Nicholson Baker in The New York Review of Books on Wikipedia, the subject a new book, "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual."

And ...
It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper.

And ...
The fragments from original sources persist like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall.

And ...
For researchers it's a place to look stuff up, [Brion] Vibber said, but for editors "it's almost more like an online game, in that it's a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that's a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, etcetera."

And ...
On December 7, 2007, somebody altered the long article on bedbugs so that it read like a horror movie....

And ...
If an article bristles with some quotes from external sources these may, like the bushy hairs on a caterpillar, make it harder to kill.

And ...
When I managed to help save something I was quietly thrilled—I walked tall, like Henry Fonda in "Twelve Angry Men."

Beat the Kettle, Slowly

Human speech, Flaubert said, is “like a cracked kettle on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to touch the stars to tears.” (Anne Midgette in The NYT).

Some Live, Some Die. Why?

Brother Juniper [in "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"] considered three possible explanations for the deaths: The victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time (a heretical interpretation he immediately rejected); God was punishing the wicked for their sins; or angels were being called early to heaven. Either humans are "like the flies that boys kill on a summer day" or they're like sparrows "who do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God." (Cynthia Crossen writing in The Wall Street Journal about why some people died and others lived in the Minneapolis bridge collapse).

Heat in the Lebanese Kitchen

"This country is like a cake. On the top it is cream. Underneath it is fire." [About Lebanon]. So a Hezbollah spokesman told me last June, speaking in the shabby Beirut apartment that served as the party's press office until an avalanche of Israeli ordnance leveled the building.... (Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books).

Dr. Dahl to Surgery, Stat

... [Roald] Dahl is of that select society of Saki (the pen name of H.H. Munro), Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, and Iris Murdoch, satiric moralists who wield the English language like a surgical instrument to flay, dissect, and expose human folly. (Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Review of Books on Dahl's "Collected Stories").

Dahl's females are particularly grotesque specimens, like Mrs. Ponsonby of "Nunc Dimittis" who is "so incredibly short and squat and stiff, [she looked as if] she had no legs at all above the knees," has a "salmon mouth" and fingers "like a bunch of small white snakes wriggling in her lap." (Oates ... and Dahl).

And from Dahl ...

I was able to take most of it in—the metallic silver-blue hair with every strand glued into place, the brown pig-eyes, the long sharp nose sniffing for trouble, the curled lips, the prognathous jaw, the powder, the mascara, the scarlet lipstick and, most shattering of all, the massive shored-up bosom that projected like a balcony in front of her.

More from Dahl ...

When she marched—Miss Trunchbull never walked, she always marched like a storm-trooper with long strides and arms aswinging—when she marched along a corridor you could actually hear her snorting as she went, and if a group of children happened to be in her path, she ploughed through them like a tank, with small people bouncing off her to left and right.

A Find at the Dump

His briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. (Don DeLillo in The New Yorker).

Kid, Get Me Rewrite

Caroline’s sense that her story is being written as she lives it becomes an analogue of the old problem of predestination versus free will, and the click-clack of the typewriter becomes the pulse of fate, like the ticking of a clock or the pounding of Poe’s tell-tale heart. (The New Yorker).

Historical Forecast: Uncertainty & Gloom

Western man in the middle of the 20th century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk. (Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. in an appreciation in today's NYT).

The Literary Amazement of Amis

[Martin] Amis's observing eye is constantly abulge with amazement at the wickedness and folly of his fellow human beings. He looks upon the world with incredulous surprise, like a man stumbling befuddled out of a dim restaurant into the acid sunlight and traffic roar of a summer afternoon in a strange city. (John Banville writing in The New York Review of Books about Amis and his new "House of Meetings.")