Alice Oswald

Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.

British Poet

Ian Anderson

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

British Musician

Salman Rushdie

Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things. We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born.

Indian Novelist

Sylvia Plath

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

American Poet

Will Self

Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

English Author

Robert Cormier

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

American Author

Ned Beauman

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

British Novelist

Franz Kafka

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

Novelist

Robert South

Similes prove nothing, but yet greatly lighten and relieve the tedium of argument.

English Clergyman

Joe R. Lansdale

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

American Writer

Similes are used to create vivid imagery or convey a strong feeling in writing.

Literary Device

A simile links two unrelated things to suggest a similarity that's often imaginative or surprising.

Imaginative Comparison

Similes often follow the pattern 'as [adjective] as' or '[noun] like', though variations exist.

Common Patterns

In music, a simile indicates that a piece should continue in the same style for consistency.

Musical Continuity

Despite the shared musical term, 'simile' in music doesn't involve comparing elements like in literature.

Not a Metaphor

Simile in sheet music serves as a cue to performers to maintain a particular expression or technique.

Instructional Cue

 The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story. We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies. We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole.

Marco Tempest: A magical...

 Those are called similes. A simile is a metaphor that admits it's making a comparison. Similes tend to make you think. Metaphors let you feel things directly. Take Shakespeare's famous metaphor, "All the world's a stage."

The art of the metaphor...

 if we want our kids to understand care about and act to conserve these vital ecosystems we need to role model it with language let us then jettison old tired inaccurate similes and metaphors like as

Simile

Literary Device

Imaginative Comparison

Common Patterns

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