See Also: MARRIAGE; MEN AND WOMEN; PARENTHOOD; PEOPLE, INTERACTION

1. Charted his moods like a cartographer —Pat Conroy

   Conroy’s simile from The Great Santini refers to the main character’s understanding of and adjustment to his father’s temperament.

2. Families are a kind of closed system; like locked trunks, they are hard to penetrate from the outside —Daphne Merkin
3. Families are like wine. You get the old vintage that goes right off: goes weak as coloured water or old scent —Julia O’Faolain
4. A family, if it is large and well-connected, is like a religion —Paul Theroux

   In the novel, Picture Palace, from which this is taken, the author follows up the simile with the following explanation: “It serves the same purpose, to bewitch the believer with joy and offer him salvation; it consoles, it enchants, it purifies.”

5. Getting to know someone is like opening a safe: you have to learn the unique combination of numbers —Delmore Schwartz

   Schwartz followed this entry into his journal with “No, this is not really true.”

6. Her life was hung upon this relationship, like the cloth of a tent that would collapse into loose folds without the central post that supported it —Tennessee Williams
7. Human relations just aren’t fixed in their orbits like the planets; they’re more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away —May Sarton
8. The idea of a step-father is like a substitute host on a talk show —Bobbie Ann Mason
9. In the beginning of a relationship, if you’re lucky enough to find wit at the right moments, it’s like getting a cab in the rain —Steve Post, WNYC/FM, December 22, 1986
10. (There were Ben and his father, eye to eye, as) intimate as lovers —Pat Conroy
11. I was there for you, like an Eye-Beam … any other beam would do —John Updike
12. Know each other’s thoughts. Without words, as if traveling on connected bloodstreams —Mary Hedin
13. Know each other, crack and flaw, like two irregular stones that fit together —Adrienne Rich
14. Like the slowly tumbling arabesque of little cloud shapes drifting across the sand cliffs on a summer wind, neither [of two close sisters] was anything without the other —Wilbur Daniel Steele
15. Never got on … like a couple of dogs not liking each other’s smells —Frank Swinnerton
16. Relationship … as fragile as spindly bridges —David Leavitt, New York Times Book Review, 1986

    See Also: FRAGILITY

17. The relationship bumps along like a car with three tires —Ira Wood
18. Relationship … like two engines running at variance —D. H. Lawrence
19. The relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze —John Ashberry
20. Spread herself out like a cloak for the king to walk on —Suzi Gablik, New York Times Book Review, 1986

    The simile is used to explain the relationship between the author of My Life with Chagall and the artist.

21. The string between you wore out … like old elastic —Tess Slesinger
22. The sweet sorrow of loving a parent is as pure as the taste of a sourball when you are five —Norman Mailer
23. Their (a mother and daughter) connection had built-in tension and resiliency. Like the coiled telephone cord through which they communicated —Ellen Goodman
24. There was room for improvement [in relationship between two men] … a sort of gap, like the Grand Canyon —J. F. Powers
25. Torn between them [warring parents] like a plot of land they both wanted to lay claim to —Ann Jasperson
26. Treated her like a twenty-carat diamond —Rita Mae Brown
27. Understand one another like thieves at a fair —Anatole France
28. (After half an hour … ) we were as familiar with one another as if we had unbosomed our whole life histories —Erich Maria Remarque