Maxed Metaphors

Allegedly from NSW year 12 English essays:

• Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.


• He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.


• She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
• The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
• McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a plastic bag filled with vegetable soup.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
• Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the centre.
• Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
• He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot oil.
• John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
• The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
• Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
• Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
• The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
• He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
• She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
• It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
• The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
• The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
• He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
• She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.
• She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature beef.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.