#beauty

We also maintain - again with perfect truth - that mystery is more than half of beauty, the element of strangeness that stirs the senses through the imagination. ↗

— Richard Le Gallienne

#also #beauty #element #half #imagination

Finally, a twenty-two old girl was dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, "the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen as an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed, 'Oh God! How beautiful! ↗

— Ann Dillard

#pilgrim-at-tinker-creek #beauty

They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up. ↗

— Zadie Smith

#beauty

They saw me, those reckless seekers of beauty, and in a night I was famous. ↗

— Lillie Langtry

#famous #i #me #night #reckless

Here's the thing: I am not beautiful. I'm pretty. I'll allow that much. Pretty. But I'm not the girl boys long for. ↗

— Katherine Applegate

#pretty #beauty

In the fire of his embrace, all that was her ceased to exist. Only what was God remained. I am. The cloisterbell, the voice of Christ. He spoke again: I am. She tried to obey but was frozen in beauty, like a fly trapped in amber. She could not move. Nothing exists apart from me. Self had been an illusion, a dream. God dreaming. ↗

— Mark Salzman

#self-is-an-illusion #the-voice-of-god #beauty

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks. ↗

— John Burnham Schwartz

#sorrow #beauty

...good fortune is not only good fortune, and over the years things happened in that family that caused some terrible regret. Still, for years it all seemed to me to be blindingly beautiful. And it was. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#beauty

Throughout the centuries, man has considered himself beautiful. I rather suppose that man only believes in his own beauty out of pride; that he is not really beautiful and he suspects this himself; for why does he look on the face of his fellow-man with such scorn? ↗

— Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

#beauty #believes #centuries #considered #does

He built up a situation that was far enough from the truth. It never occurred to him that Helen was to blame. He forgot the intensity of their talk, the charm that had been lent him by sincerity, the magic of Oniton under darkness and of the whispering river. Helen loved the absolute. Leonard had been ruined absolutely, and had appeared to her as a man apart, isolated from the world. A real man, who cared for adventure and beauty, who desired to live decently and pay his way, who could have travelled more gloriously through life than the Juggernaut car that was crushing him. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#intensity #misunderstanding #river #ruination #water