Relevant Quotes from Nat. West

Yet, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. (22)

The dwarf hunched his shoulders as though he were going to pull a gun or throw a punch. (30)

If you threw yourself on her it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. (34)

Love is like a vending machine, eh? Not bad? (40)

He was like one of Picasso’s great sterile athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves. (56)

Homer’s feelings were so intense that his head bobbed stiffly on his neck like that of a toy Chinese dragon. (59)

But whether he was happy or not it is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. (67)

She was taut and vibrant. She was as shiny as a new spoon. (73)

To hold them [his hands] still, he clasped them together. Their fingers twined like a tangle of thighs in miniature. (84)

But in Homer’s case it would be like dropping a spark in a barn full of hay. (84)

His thoughts frightened him and he bolted into the house, hoping to leave them behind like a hat. (84)

The sensation he felt was like that he got from holding an egg in his hand. Not that she was fragile or even seemed fragile. It wasn’t that. It was her completeness, her egg-like self-sufficiency, that made him want to crush her. (91-92)

The only explanation for this contrast is that she is enjoying the release that wild flight gives in much the same way that a game bird must when, after hiding for several tense minutes, it bursts from cover in complete, unthinking panic. (93)

He looked like the interlocutor in a minstrel show. (118)

That was because her beauty was structural like a tree’s, not a quality of her mind or heart. (120)

He shouted at her like a Y.M.C.A. lecturer on sex hygiene. (120)

He fooled himself into believing this with an image, as though a man were a piece of iron to be heated and then straightened with hammers blows. (133)

The sun is a joke. (192)

She was like a cork. (186)

Were all prophets of doom and destruction such happy men?