The Quality of Mercy

I handed the test in five minutes before the end of the day. Mrs. Baker took it calmly, then reached into her bottom drawer for an enormous red pen with a wide felt tip. "Stand here and we'll see you've done," she said, which is sort of like a dentist handing you a mirror and saying, "Sit here and watch while I drill a hole in your tooth." The first four were wrong, and she slashed through my answers with a broad swathe of bright red ink. It looked like the test was bleeding to death.

"Not such a good beginning," she said.

"The quality of mercy is not strained," I said.

-Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars, 60.

Oreo

In this way Penelope's happy and sad feelings got all mixed up together, until they were not unlike one of those delicious cookies they have nowadays, the ones with a flat circle of sugary cream sandwiched between two chocolate-flavored wafers. In her heart she felt a soft, hidden core of sweet melancholy nestled inside crisp outer layers of joy...

-Maryrose Wood, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, 175.

Wet Laundry

A pudgy young man with slicked sandy hair appeared before them. Shaking his hand was like removing wet laundry from a washing machine.

-Christopher Fowler, Seventy-Seven Clocks, 67.

A Sackful of Squirrels

Two figures in particular seemed ill-matched. One, a young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he walked a little like an affronted heron.

The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the older side of completely indeterminate. If you picked a number at random, he was probably a little older than that, but--well, it was impossible to tell.

-Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 12-13.

Simile

I think we all want truth
But truth, it is just like cream
It will rise straight to the top
But not unless you stop stirring it up

-Jonny Rogers, "Jerusalem"