Things are Like Other Things

One thing is like another only with reference to that in virtue of 
which it is such and such; thus this forms the peculiar mark of 
quality.
 —Aristotle, Categoriae

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

And I went straight for it, like a cripple goes for a cane. —Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be?

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

So it was that we stumbled into the country life like an infant who takes his first astonished steps and then, as his frightened grin dissolves, reaches out to catch himself against the side of a red-hot wood stove. —Ben Metcalf, Against the Country

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

It was like a car hurtling towards an abyss, slamming on the brakes. —Cesar Aira, How I Became A Nun

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Because describing cocaine nowadays would be a bit like describing a traffic light. —Javier Marías, The Infatuations

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Control’s mother often seemed to him like a flash of light across a distant night sky. —Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Somewhat like the marketplace for retail commodities, databases are the result of often unnoticed labor, the collecting together of things (objects, information, people) all made to appear as if passively and innocently awaiting activation, like a reserve army of supposedly dormant units each amenable to being isolated from or arranged with every other. —Lane Relyea, Your Everyday Art World

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Each remark crouches like a wolf ready to pounce, for the one who can hear what he is saying. —Lars Iyer, Wittgenstein Jr

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

He would greet me like an old friend—an anchor of sorts, to make sense of his existence—but not like a lover. —Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

They seemed to fulfil that role for each other; and although they were clearly married, I never caught one of them putting on an artificial or studiedly soppy expression, like some couples who have lived together for years and make a point of showing how much in love they still are, as if that somehow increased their value or embellished them. —Javier Marías, The Infatuations

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Groys, like Adorno, possesses firm if abstract radical commitments and is a writer of relentlessly dialectical sentences in German. —Benjamin Kunkel, Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Children are still modelling the world, still understanding how it works; their convictions are malleable, like their bones. —Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Like so many writers, he was a mean, spineless little scrounger. —Javier Marías, The Infatuations

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Like many mothers, Carol had big plans for her son. —Rachel Cantor, A Highly Unlikely Scenario

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

Oh, he doted on her, exactly like a man will. —Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

It's as follows: like some vagrant bitch she was guided entirely by her own remote control. —Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner. —Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One, translated by Don Bartlett

[thingsarelikeotherthings]

He took out his bowie knife, to cut the corset free—but he began too like a butcher, and Anna made a noise of distress. —Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries