Eye Color
Eye Color
See Also: BLACK, BLUE, BROWN, EYE(S), GRAY, GREEN
- Black eyes like plum pits —Bernard Malamud
- Black eyes turned shiny like the sun —Shirley Ann Grau
- Blue eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished and just about indestructible —Sylvia Plath
- Blue eyes … round and open like two lakes —Aharon Megged
- Blue eyes that sat in his lined face like a piece of sky —Erich Maria Remarque
- Brown eyes like quicksand —Diane Ackerman
- Eyes … black and burning as coal —Lord Byron
Byron’s “Black as coal” comparison from Don Juan has been much used, and with many new twists, several of which can be found here. The “Black as coal” comparison has also been linked with many other descriptive references.
- Eyes … black as bullets and as fierce —Belva Plain
- Eyes … blue and guileless as a doll’s —David Brierley
- Eyes … brown and irisless, like those of an old dog —William Faulkner
- Eyes … deepened to the color of caramel, like sugar coming to a boil —Louise Erdrich
- Eyes faded to a brittle, metallic gray, like chips of slate —James Crumley
- Eyes … light, blue, like colorless water reflecting a blue sky —Jessamyn West
In the short story, The Calla Lily Cleaners & Dyers, from which this is taken, the simile is extended as follows: “And his face being so suntanned they were more like vacancies in his head than eyes.”
- Eyes, like bitter chocolate —Margaret Millar
A more recent example of this simile appeais Ira Wood’s novel The Kitchen Man which is as chockfull of food imagery as a refrigerator after a weekly shopping trip,
- Eyes … like black buttons or raisins sunk in dough —Nina Bawden
- Eyes … like blue cake-icing —Truman Capote
- Eyes like blue-painted glass —Flannery O’Connor
- Eyes like chocolate fudge still warm from the pan —Elizabeth Spencer
- Eyes like the sky on a misty summer morning —Piers Anthony
- Eyes … like those of a rabbit, not frightened, but utterly impenetrable —Graham Masterton
- Eyes pale as the moon —Grace Paley
- Eyes redder than burning coals —Gustave Flaubert
- Eyes so pale they were like openings on the sky —Wright Morris
- Eyes the color of water vapor —T. Coraghessan Boyle
- Eyes … they didn’t have much color … like, whoever was putting the color into them got a phone call in the middle and just quit —Lee Smith
- Eyes … warmly blue as the glint of summer sunshine on an iceberg drifting in Southern seas —O. Henry
- Gray eyes … watery like the winter sky —Frank Tuohy
- Large, brown eyes like mushroom caps —Helen Hudson
In her novel, Meyer Meyer, Helen Hudson returns to this simile with another: “Her dull mushroom eyes seemed to have grown smaller, as though they had been sautéed too long.”
- Light-blue eyes … like bits of glass —Jean Rhys
- Pale eyes like pools of phlegm —Richard S. Prather
- Sharp blue eyes, each like a pin —Robert Browning
- Small green eyes, like grapes about to burst —Mary McCarthy
- Soft brown eyes, like those of a mild-tempered dog —Frank Swinnerton
- Toffee-colored eyes like a spaniel’s —T. H. White
- Wet blue eyes, like eyes in a clear aspic —Jonathan Valin