The bar’s manager, Jerry Warren, who was small, ingratiating, and somehow like a frog in a polo shirt, sidled up to the table.
That the powerboats looked like huge tennis shoes only added to his general dissatisfaction with the world.
The clouds were moving fast now because of high-altitude winds, and when Briggs parked and got out of the car, the hotel towering over him looked like the prow of a ship crossing a pale blue ocean.
The feeling of being completely lost was claustrophobic, like being locked in a windowless room.
The houses are like little forts.
Sometimes earlier they had been sold loyalty much as the far-fetched basics of religion are sold to the credulous.
She went inside and Homer surveyed the prospects, holding his lapels like an expectant haberdasher.
Needle and thread, buffalo, and orchard grass spread like a billowing counterpane around the small headstones …
Now the sound of my blades, which had seemed to fill the air around me, was replaced by another as murmurous as a church congregation heard from afar.
People in relationships nowadays seemed to retain their secrets like bank deposits – they always set some aside, in case they might need them to spend on someone new.
… she responded to my grandmother’s well-concealed wrath like an educated dog.
The husband was a specimen of tidy manhood, with black, tightly clipped hair, blue eyes, and ears like little seashells ...
The only other woman, a heavyset Spanish-speaking black, watched Errol with sullen attention as though he were there to present a bill or a summons.
When he remembered the myriad plastic Madonnas in the jalopies at his groves, like little scenes of lynchings, hanging from rearview mirrors or from the branches of orange trees .…
Too late: he was swept aside, forced to stand, hands on hips, until the musicians had passed, his baton on the ground bent like a pretzel.
When we threw the head out on the ground she turned to it and lowed like it was her baby.
Yet as she was as elegant as an ancient Spanish altarpiece, Errol almost wished some of the others were here, especially Raymond Fitzpatrick, of whom she was so fond.
You ought to hear him describe heaven. It sounds like Filene’s department store.
This behavior was disturbing and made me ambivalent about my grandmother, who treated me like a prince.
They looked like two sticks in their bathing suits, no butts but the same superior smiles.
The record playing in the background was scratchy, and the orchestra accompanying the various tenors sounded like a bunch of steamboats all blowing their whistles; at the same time, I could see the appeal of being drunk.
The road stretched before me like an arrow.
The whole experience had been like missing a catch on the high trapeze: the acrobat is pulling away from you, falling into the distance. Or perhaps the acrobat is pulling you off your own trapeze.
Their gazes crisscrossed like light beams, giving nothing away.
My uncle Gerry finally showed up too, in his glossy black trooper boots and Boston police uniform, which seemed thrillingly archaic, like something Black Jack Pershing might have worn.
Many locals had been killed when the Teton Dam burst, and despite that they wanted to build it again: the relationship to water here was like a war, in war lives are lost.
Everything reminded her of family, like it was a substance. Not the family or my family but just family, like it was liverwurst or toothpaste.
Errol wished he could have slipped in beside her, to begin pouring out his heart in crazy familiarity, to detach himself completely from his own story and watch it sail out into the air like a ribbon.
Father Corrigan gazed with detachment, wig tipped up like a jaybird: the services this family expected of me probably struck him as verging on sacrilegious.
For decades he had nursed his dream of going home, but when he moved back his dismay was all-consuming; Montana seemed like a place he had once read about in a dentist’s office …”
For the several days of the viewing, the wake, the funeral Mass, it was as if we were troops following orders.
Dulcie was after him like a bad dog, and knowing she was just trying to get the vice president’s job made it all oddly spicy.
Briggs ran alongside in an L.L. Bean bathrobe pouring out offers of help, but Erik waved him off like a man shooing flies.
A barmaid came to their table, in jeans and a T-shirt advertising a whale-watching boat on Prince of Wales Island; the breaching whale in the drawing was bigger than the boat, whose worshipful passengers were linked up like a choir.
Amid gusts that sound like gunshots, he sheeted the trysail to leeward, lashed the tiller in the opposite direction, and produced a plausible version of heaving to .…
Anymore, she hasn’t been well. Used to she was sweet as pudding.
Because there were four of us, all friends, I was able to sample each celebrated entrée, and I can report to you without prejudice that they all smelled like toilet seats.
Four Corners was filled with dentists’ offices, fast-food and espresso shops, and large and somehow foreboding filling stations that looked, at night, like colonies in space …
… he could look through the old glass windows with their bubbles and imperfections and see Erik sitting on the lawn, arms propped behind him, face angled into the sun like a girl in a Coppertone ad.
Like a Method actor, I already believed my part.
Like a jury they were waiting for me in the kitchen.
Like many of their generation, my parents believed in the absolute odorlessness of vodka and applied to its consumption none of the restraint of the blends whose broadly familiar aroma marked the user like a traffic light.
Like someone drifting lazily down the Niagara River, the big fall is just a matter of time.
Looking at each other, the children put their hands on the keys, which snapped up and down all around their fingers as Judy took over the pumping and Jack howled like a dog; soon they were caught up in it.
Impossible to imagine the drum major out here like some animated Q-Tip.
I saw myself rocketing through the railings of the Brightman Street Bridge and plunging into the nocturnal gloom of the Taunton River below. But the Buick rolled along like a ship and my panic abated.
He was keenly interested in the tea clippers and had an old painting that he claimed to have fished out of some Yankee’s garbage pail, a portrait of a Massachusetts sea captain dressed in embroidered robes like the emperor of China.
His gratitude toward his little ship was evident in his belief that she had treated him like a cherished dependent and hung on her anchor, keeping a fresh breeze across his bunk until such time as he could return to the tiller like a man.
His voice struck Briggs like a saw.
Huge schools of bait, shadows in the pale Gulf green, erupted like hail falling on the water as predators coursed through and terns dove at them from above.
A bananaquit, an urgent little yellow bird, danced down the path ahead of him, landed, and then scurried off like a mouse.

Featured Simile

Taking orders in a soft low voice, calling them to the cook with a screech like a peacock.
-- Grapes of Wrath, The - Steinbeck, John - 1939