#ode

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#post-modernism #postmodern #age

Youth is a question of energy. ↗

— Vanessa Paradis

#attitude #energy #model #question #quote

I believe I met a girl in the rain, who had lost her mother's earrings. And I killed her. Now I stand here in a time I know nothing about. I watched the death of kings far greater than any man living now. And I am still here. ↗

— Rebecca Maizel

#death

The humble one, is the better one. ↗

— Yap Lik Hock

#behaviour #humble #humbleness #modesty #spiritual

Because nine years ago, I walked up to the most beautiful girl in the bar, and tonight she's still the only person I want to talk to. ↗

— Julie James

#beauty

Modesty answers not the crude how of femininity, but the beautiful why. ↗

— Wendy Shalit

#femininity #modesty #women #beauty

Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about? ↗

— Douglas Adams

#beauty-in-literature #beauty-in-nature #wodehouse #beauty

Who's to blame when your kid goes nuts? Is it a blessing to not have children? 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' became a hit cult book for women without offspring who were finally able to admit they didn't want to give birth. They felt complete, thank you very much, and lived in silent resentment for years at other women's pious, unwanted sympathy toward them for not having babies. With even gay couples having children these days, aren't happy heterosexual women who don't want to have kids the most ostracized of us all? To me they are beautiful feminists. If you're not sure you could love your children, please don't have them, because they might grow up and kill us. ↗

— John Waters

#beauty

I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#proust #rooms #beauty

Is this the curse of modernity, to live in a world without judgment, without perspective, no context for understanding or distinguishing what is real and what is imagined, what is manipulated and what is by chance beautiful, what is shadow and what is flesh? ↗

— Terry Tempest Williams

#beauty