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)

I Thought We Grow To Be Old Farts In Phoenix

But I've been here since the beginning like a prefix (Thug Love Story 2012 by Action Bronson)

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)

All Shook Up

The fact of his eventual death shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. He could only squeal in pain. (Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes.) 

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)

Painting a Political Picture

The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting. (Maureen Dowd in The NYT).

The Devils Made Him Do It

“Sean Avery is like a case of jock rash. It’s there, it bothers you, and eventually you have to just play through it.” (The New Yorker quoting a retired NHL referee, Paul Stewart, on Avery's playoff antics.

A Different Sort of Buzz

Reality Stars Are Dropping Like Flies! (TMZ.com).

In Surgery, Checking the Light Upstairs

My surgery lasted nine hours, and for most of it I had to be awake, so that the doctors could test the connection, like asking somebody to go upstairs and see if the light in the bedroom comes back on while you fiddle with the circuit-breaker box in the basement.(Michael Kinsley in The New Yorker).

Frogs, Hymns & the Smell of Mud

There are others, but tree frog croon is deep. Like the hymns we sang every morning at school. Or muffled voices rising from the kitchen. The wind through the crack in a pane. When I hear the peepers it's time to smell mud, to dig, to quit your tent. (A Walk Around the Lake blog).

Popcorn Done, Is This Race Over Yet?

One Obama adviser moaned that the race was “beginning to feel like a hostage crisis” and would probably go on for another month to six weeks. And Obama said that the “God, when will this be over?” primary season was like “a good movie that lasted about a half an hour too long.” (Maureen Dowd in The New York Times).

And ...

Obama, like the preternaturally gifted young heroes in mythical tales, is still learning to channel his force.

The Spitzer Pile-Up

The Eliot Spitzer case is one of those public train wrecks in which the clichés pile up like freight cars in a chain-reaction collision. “Follow the money … ” (It was an I.R.S. investigation of Governor Spitzer’s suspicious cash transfers that led to the prostitution ring.) “The cover-up is always worse than the crime … ” (It was the governor’s effort to hide the source, destination, and purpose of the money he was moving around that may be a more serious offense than violation of an antique white-slavery law.) “Pride goeth before a fall … ” (A man who dared to think he might one day be president is a national laughingstock instead). But the most apt cliché of all is the most karmic: “What goes around comes around.” (Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair).

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."

Obama's Mrs: Gladiator or Tin Man

[Michelle] Obama works out like “a gladiator,” a friend has said. (Lauren Collins in The New Yorker).

And ...

When people — they’re almost always shorter — ask her to pose for pictures, instead of bending her knees she leans at the waist, like the Tin Man.

And ...

It assuages fears of difference — “We’re just like you” is the cumulative message of all the back-and-forth about the breath and the bread — and inoculates against jealousy, a smart bit of self-deprecation on the part of a young, gifted, attractive couple whose fortunes have risen quickly, like movie stars insisting that they were unpopular in high school.

Exercising the Body Politic

The candidate who tried to present herself as inevitable has been out-maneuvered nearly every step of the way by a prodigy with a warm and brilliant smile who still seems as energetic as an athlete doing calisthenics before a big game. (Bob Herbert in The NYT.