At the outset of A Christmas Carol (1843)—in describing Jacob Marley being ‘dead as a doornail'—Charles Dickens famously quips that ‘the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile’. This idea suggests that the simile, as a language device, bespeaks an ancient, universal sort of truth in its comparative gesture.

In this vein, a famous simile characterises in the classic American film Forrest Gump (1994), based on the 1986 novel by Winston Groom, with adapted screenplay by Eric Roth. Sitting, in the opening scene of the film, at the bus stop where he guilelessly tells strangers the grand stories of his extraordinary life, Forrest Gump (played by the wondrous Tom Hanks) presents a pearl of wisdom he gained from his mother:

‘My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."'

It’s a vivid simile depicting the precariousness of life—and made all the more poignant in being spoken by a simple man, whose mother ‘always had a way of explaining things so [he] could understand them’. Notably, in the flashback moment when Mrs Gump (Sally Field) tells Forrest this wise truth, right before she dies, she makes it a metaphor: ‘Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest’. So it’s Forrest’s own version, with the added ‘like’, that make the most memorable soundbite—perhaps with the added clarity.

Wisdom in simplicity.