The Best Simile of All Time

In reading Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana (a great surreal spy thriller), I came across what I think is the best simile I've ever seen. I wish I'd written it down at the time, and I can't find it now, so I don't remember the exact sentence, but Greene described a character doing something "like a human". I just thought this was such a brilliant, emotive way to describe somebody's actions, thoughts, anything, and also sublimely simple.

Describing somebody as "like a human" immediately puts the reader right into the shoes of the character in question and makes them consider just how they would feel in such a situation; it highlights the fragility of the human body and the human mind in reacting to trauma or joy; it allies the reader closely with the character that the simile is being applied to; it accentuates the gut wrenching emotion felt by the character, and lets us know exactly how they are feeling in a way that no other metaphor could.

I don’t think Greene would mind (in his current dead state) if I stole “like a human” from him. It’s an agonising phrase to apply, because you know that there’s probably only one occasion out of everything that you write that you can use it. If you came across the phrase used twice by an author it would seem very strange, and perhaps lose much of the impact from the first time that you saw it, so you’d have to work very hard to find the most appropriate place to drop it. I wonder if Greene agonised over it for years, tentatively dropping it into other novels and removing it before he settled on using it in Our Man in Havana, or whether it came to him in a moment of genius. Maybe it just slipped out and he barely realised it. That’s the true beauty of the phrase: it’s something that at first seems so innocuous, and it’s only when you pause to consider it that you realise how utterly magnificent it is.