Frank J. Wilstach, comp. A Dictionary of Similes. 1916.
Face
His face is like a street before they lay the pavement.
—Anonymous
Thy face, like dawn when it lights the dawn.
—Arabian Nights
Sweet youthful face, fair as the moon at full.
—Edwin Arnold
His face looks like a warrant.
—Beaumont and Fletcher
A face that cannot smile is like a bud that cannot blossom which dries up in the stalk.
—Henry Ward Beecher
His face is like the pippin, grown red ripe in frosty suns that shone.
—Arthur. C. Benson
His face is fair as heaven.
—William Blake
Her face was like the April moon,
Clad in a wintry cloud.
—Vincent Bourne
A sharp face, like a knife in a cleft stick.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
He had a face like a benediction.
—Miguel de Cervantes
That face of yours looks like the title-page of a whole volume of roguery.
—Colley Cibber
His face looked like a face that had refused to jell and was about to run down on his clothes.
—Irvin S. Cobb
Face,
Long as a courtier’s out of place.
—George Colman, the Younger
Face like an ancient lemon.
—Joseph Conrad
A face like a smoked herring.
—Anatole France
A face like the setting sun on a summer’s day, when promise of a hot day to-morrow is read in its ruddy hue.
—Frank Carlos Griffith
Her little face is like a walnut shell
With wrinkling lines.
—William Ernest Henley
Face like a flame.
—Maurice Hewlett
Her face like roses blown,
And in the radiance and the hush,
Her thought was shown.
—Jean Ingelow
A face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue.
—Henry James
His face is like a squeezed orange.
—Ben Jonson
Her face was like the earthen pitcher of Gideon: it concealed the light.
—George MacDonald
His face was like an April morn
Clad in a wintry cloud.
—David Mallet
A face, like nestling luxury of flowers.
—Gerald Massey
Her fair face half hid, like a ripe peeping rose.
—Owen Meredith
Her face is as white
As her pillow by night.
—Owen Meredith
She is hid away all but her face, and that’s hung about with toys and devices, like the signe of a taverne, to draw strangers.
—Sir Thomas Overbury
Faces did glister like the key-hole of a powdering-tub.
—François Rabelais
A face open as day.
—Samuel Rogers
Thy face is like the full moon of heaven, allied to light, but far from my hopes.
—Romance of Antar
Her own face was like a flower
Of the prime,
Half in sunshine, half in shower,
In the year’s most tender time.
—Christina Georgina Rossetti
Her face was like an opening rose,
So bright to look upon:
But now it is like fallen snows,
As cold, as dead, as wan.
—Christina Georgina Rossetti
Faces are as legible as books, with this difference in their favor, that they may be perused in much less time than printed pages, and are less liable to be misunderstood.
—Frederic Saunders
’Tis not that she paints so ill but, when she has finished her face, she joins so badly to her neck, that she looks like a mended statue, in which the connoisseur may see at once that the head is modern, though the trunk’s antique.
—Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Her face was like a lily hidden in holy dusks.
—George Sterling
Her face was like the Milky Way i’ the sky,
A meeting of gentle lights without a name.
—Sir John Suckling
Thy face
Was as a water’s wearied with wind.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne
His face was as the must that lies upon a vat of new-made wine.
—Oscar Wilde