#lines

There are only two kinds of people in our town. The stupid and the stuck." ↗

— Kami Garcia

#first-lines #opening-lines #beauty

Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. ↗

— H.L. Mencken

#beauty

Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted. ↗

— Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

#ugliness #beauty

Like almost every truly horrible thing that has ever happened in the history of our world, the end also began with a kiss. ↗

— Dennis Sharpe

#deep-thoughts #end-of-the-world #hauntingly-beautiful #truer-words-were-never-spoken #beauty

I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, 'No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving,' and then you do it. ↗

— Leo Buscaglia

#destiny #loneliness #change

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#life #loneliness #ministry #change

On the plane leaving Tokyo I’m sitting alone in back twisting the knobs on Etch-A-Sketch and Roger is next to me singing “Over the Rainbow” straight into my ear, things changing, falling apart, fading, another year, a few more moves, a hard person who doesn’t give a fuck, a boredom so monumental it humbles, arrangements so fleeting made by people you don’t even know that it requires you to lose any sense of reality you might have once acquired, expectations so unreasonable you become superstitious about ever matching them. Roger offers me a joint and I take a drag and stare out the window and I relax for a moment when the lights of Tokyo, which I never realized is an island, vanish from view but this feeling only lasts a moment because Roger is telling me that other lights in other cities, in other countries, on other planets, are coming into view soon. ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#change

Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change is what we want when we cannot. ↗

— Nuala O'Faolain

#change

But saints and angels behold that glory of God which consists in the beauty of His holiness; and it is this sight only that will melt and humble the hearts of men, wean them from the world, draw them to God, and effectually change them. A sight of the awful greatness of God may overpower men's strength, and be more than they can endure; but if the moral beauty of God be hid, the enmity of the heart will remain in its full strength. No love will be enkindled; the will, instead of being effectually gained, will remain inflexible. But the first glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God shining into the heart produces all these effects as it were with omnipotent power, which nothing can withstand. ↗

— Jonathan Edwards

#god #holiness #love #beauty

Though I knew in my mind that others had felt such loss, this loss was mine, and I felt that no one would ever understand it, and to try to explain the lonliness and pain I felt would be futile. ↗

— Linda Hawley

#loneliness #loss #dreams