#beau

First, all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl's face; like a white, slightly luminous mask, swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung. There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around, I knew that already; and I knew that I couldn't escape it. I knew that everything [ was about to do, I had to do, I couldn't avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn't want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to get out of wherever this was. ("Nightmare") ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#femme-fatale #nightmare #beauty

Refuse to seek for the road to paradise, because every beautiful place is already a paradise! ↗

— Mehmet Murat ildan

#beauty

...it took me a lifetime of glimpses, but now I see you completely - did I tell you you're beautiful? so kind to animals, children and me... ↗

— John Geddes

#children #kindness #love #relationships #beauty

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas ↗

— Langston Hughes

#kansas #suffering #beauty

So beauty is the base of literature, also truth is the base of science and goodness is the base of ethics ↗

— علي الطنطاوي

#beauty

That literary is still based on beauty, does not know the reality and does not have fixed rules like scientific rules ↗

— علي الطنطاوي

#beauty

And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#spirit #beauty

There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#prodigy #beauty

There is beauty in the midst of tragedy. As if beauty were condensing in the heart of ugliness. It's very strange. ↗

— Hélène Berr

#beauty

The clock’s pendulum catches the firelight, and in the rattle-breathed final moments of Jacob de Zoet, amber shadows in the far corner coagulate into a woman’s form. She slips between the bigger, taller onlookers unnoticed … … and adjusts her headscarf, the better to hide her burn. She places her cool palms on Jacob’s fever-glazed face. Jacob sees himself, when he was young, in her narrow eyes. Her lips touch the place between his eyebrows. A well-waxed paper door slides open. ↗

— David Mitchell

#beauty