#din

Europeans condemned Chinese foot binding, but any society that had invented the corset had a lot to answer for. ↗

— Mary Jo Putney

#corsets #foot-binding #beauty

Things don’t have to be extraordinary to be beautiful. Even the ordinary can be beautiful. ↗

— Wicker Park

#extraordinary #ordinary #things #beauty

That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#beauty

The trees around and overhead were so thick that it was always dry inside and on Sunday morning I lay there with Jonas, listening to his stories. All cat stories start with the statement: "My mother, who was the first cat, told me this," and I lay with my head close to Jonas and listened. There was no change coming, I thought here, only spring; I was wrong to be so frightened. The days would get warmer, and Uncle Julian would sit in the sun, and Constance would laugh when she worked in the garden, and it would always be the same. Jonas went on and on ("And then we sang! And then we sang!") and the leaves moved overhead and it would always be the same. ↗

— Shirley Jackson

#hiding #security #trees #change

I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than the next, and two overstuffed chairs big enough for me to sleep in. ↗

— Clay Carmichael

#reading #shelves #beauty

In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#reading #beauty

i had to came to tell you how beautiful you look. Really, Jay, you look amazing. Hard to believe the raggedy little girl who punched me in the face could grow up to look like this. ↗

— Jillian Dodd

#jj-reinolds #that-wedding #beauty

The books weren't exactly Linnet's general reading fare, but a desperate woman will read anything. ↗

— Eloisa James

#reading #beauty

Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. ↗

— Bohumil Hrabal

#blood-vessels #dissolve #infusion #reading #sentences

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#beauty