Share your favourite metaphors

Harriet Monroe’s “jewels on a skull” metaphor at the end of this mournful passage supplies the perfect mood and imagery.

Root also married a daughter of the stockyards, but his experience was darker. He designed a house for John Walker, president of the yards, and met Walker’s daughter, Mary. During their courtship she became ill with tuberculosis. The disease rapidly gained ground, but Root remained committed to their engagement, even though it was clear to everyone he was marrying a dead woman. The ceremony was held in the house Root had designed. A friend, the poet Harriet Monroe, waited with the other guests for the bride to appear on the stairway. Monroe’s sister, Dora, was the sole bridesmaid. “A long wait frightened us,” Harriet Monroe said, “but at last the bride, on her father’s arm, appeared like a white ghost at the halfway landing, and slowly oh, so hesitantly dragging her heavy satin train, stepped down the wide stairway and across the floor to the bay window which was gay with flowers and vines. The effect was weirdly sad.” Root’s bride was thin and pale and could only whisper her vows. “Her gayety,” Harriet Monroe wrote, “seemed like jewels on a skull.”
​

From The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.

 

Here’s a famous example from “I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou:

But a BIRD that stalks down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
And his tune is heard on the distant hill for
The caged bird sings of freedom.

 

One of the books I’m currently reading is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Here’s a snippet with a striking metaphor:

"There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It’s like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain. The comparison occurred to Mr. Verloc because he had sat astride various army horses in his time, and had now the sensation of an incipient fall. The prospect was as black as the window-pane against which he was leaning his forehead. And suddenly the face of Mr. Vladimir, clean-shaved and witty, appeared enhaloed in the glow of its rosy complexion like a sort of pink seal impressed on the fatal darkness."​

 

He hated to have a conversation die out like this. He wasn’t quick enough. While he was looking for a question Doc asked one. Hazel hated that, it meant casting about in his mind for an answer and casting about in Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum. Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits. He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and line and lures and gaffs all snarled up.
~ John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

 

I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

 

Lol. Is she dreaming of you?

 

Aw, I bet she is crazy about you.

 

"I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between stars."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

 

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

 

The following paragraph is from The Cocktail Waitress authored by James M. Cain, the gentleman who wrote the better-known The Postman Always Rings Twice. Female POV FYI.

The car pulled off onto the highway and we rode along in silence, I with no more sense of where we were than a child being driven by her parents. Once, Tom put his hand on my leg and I shivered beneath it, not from excitement but from relief. It was like a cool cloth on a burn.

 

One of my favorites is actually from a movie. In Unforgiven, the sheriff Little Bill is trying to build a house during the length of the film, but it leaks when it rains.

 

"She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."

--Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

 

Sounds dirty. I like it.

 

"She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?"

- from Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

 

One of the most famous Chandlerisms...

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”

--Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

(Ah, and one more, just for fun ...

“A few locks of dry, white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.” — The Big Sleep)

 

"It's true what they say: Cops and women don't mix. It's like eating a spoonful of Drano; sure, it'll clean you out, but it'll leave you hollow inside."

From The Naked Gun

(I guess that's technically a simile, but it stuck with me all these years, lol.)

 

Aha, so that's where Mr. Trump got the idea for everyone to drink industrial bleach!

*glug glug glug ...*