Beauty Quotes - Page 44

How I should despise such a thing if I were a man. What a nose she has! what a chin! what a neck! Then her eyes--and the worst kissing lips in the universe.

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I felt like I was seeing Shannon through a new lens, undistracted by Jennifer's nuclear glow. I could see how pretty she really was, how kind her eyes were.

The surgeons' market is imaginary, since there is nothing wrong with women's faces or bodies that social change won't cure; so the surgeons depend for their income on warping female self-perception and multiplying female self-hatred.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing.

Marilynne Robinson

Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth pressed its mystery into my living blood.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them.

Men won't easily give up a system in which half the world's population works for next to nothing...[and recognizes that]precisely because that half works for so little, it may have no energy left to fight for anything else.

Since middle-class Western women can best be weakened psychologically now that we are stronger materially, the beauty myth, as it has resurfaced in the last generation, has had to draw on more technological sophistication and reactionary fervor than ever before. The modern arsenal of the myth is a dissemination of millions of images of the current ideal; although this barrage is generally seen as a collective sexual fantasy, there is in fact little that is sexual about it. It is summoned out of political fear on the part of male-dominated institutions threatened by women's freedom, and it exploits female guilt and apprehension about our own liberation -- latent fears that we might be going too far.

Beauty is given to dolls, majesty to haughty vixens, but mind, feeling, passion and the crowning grace of fortitude are the attributes of an angel.

Charlotte Brontë

Go ahead and point out my flaws and weaknesses to me. In doing so it's just something to get excited about! Knowing there's a flaw that my Heavenly Daddy wants to make beautiful is rather exciting!

Melissa Bradley

The sky's gray and there's mizzle. It's so soft on my skin--it's nothing like rain. It's even softer than the lightest drizzle! Lift my face up, so it can kiss my skin." The Panopticon

And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled.I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well.The hunger.The desire.Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.

...he talked quite naturally while we ate — about the difficulty of finding words to describe the luminous mist, and why one has the desire to describe beauty."Perhaps it's an attempt to possess it," I said."Or be possessed by it; perhaps that's the same thing, really. I suppose it's the complete identification with beauty one's seeking."The mist grew brighter and brighter.

Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist--for we would be no longer who we are.

Stephen R. Lawhead

It's hard not to stand in awe and enchantment with the beauty in which nature expresses herself.

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.People saw one thing, they swooned over it. They saw this other thing, they pounded it with sticks.Maybe there had to be variety for life to work. Swoon over everything, you get bored. Beat everything with a stick-boring.

He used to say the uglier things are the longer they live, and the ugliest things live forever.

Mal Peet

At that moment the universe appeared to me a vast machine constructed only to produce evil. I almost doubted the goodness of God, in not annihilating man on the day he first sinned. "The world should have been destroyed," I said, "crushed as I crush this reptile which has done nothing in its life but render all that it touches as disgusting as itself." I had scarcely removed my foot from the poor insect when, like a censoring angel sent from heaven, there came fluttering through the trees a butterfly with large wings of lustrous gold and purple. It shone but a moment before my eyes; then, rising among the leaves, it vanished into the height of the azure vault. I was mute, but an inner voice said to me, "Let not the creature judge his Creator; here is a symbol of the world to come. As the ugly caterpillar is the origin of the splendid butterfly, so this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose poorest beauty will infinitely exceed your mortal imagination. And when you see the magnificent result of that which seems so base to you now, how you will scorn your blind presumption, in accusing Omniscience for not having made nature perish in her infancy.God is the god of justice and mercy; then surely, every grief that he inflicts on his creatures, be they human or animal, rational or irrational, every suffering of our unhappy nature is only a seed of that divine harvest which will be gathered when, Sin having spent its last drop of venom, Death having launched its final shaft, both will perish on the pyre of a universe in flames and leave their ancient victims to an eternal empire of happiness and glory.

A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.

Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless.

Dejan Stojanovic

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.

Beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face.... The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us too much of a prima donna.

She is not fair to outward viewAs many maidens be;Her loveliness I never knewUntil she smiled on me.Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,A well of love, a spring of light.

Hartley Coleridge

sad things are beautiful only from a distancetherefore you just want to get away from themfrom a distance of one hundred and thirty years ....i'm going to distance myself until the world is beautiful

Tao Lin

The beauty of this day doesn't depend on its lasting forever.

If ever any beauty I did see,Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Between the dark, heavily laden treetops of the spreading chestnut trees could be seen the dark blue of the sky, full of stars, all solemn and golden, which extended their radiance unconcernedly into the distance. That was the nature of the stars. and the trees bore their buds and blossoms and scars for everyone to see, and whether it signified pleasure or pain, they accepted the strong will to live. flies that lived only for a day swarmed toward their death. every life had its radiance and beauty. i had insight into it all for a moment, understood it and found it good, and also found my life and sorrows good.

Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Louis de Bernières

I firmly believe that everyone deserves to live within walking distance of either beauty or convenience, if not both. (48)

How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty - what one poet has called "this grace wholly gratuitous"? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose? (64)

Dream Song:In the heavens A noise, Like the rustling of the trees.

Frances Densmore

What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?""The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land--North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler--the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name--the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location.""You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked."It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?""The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white--redbud and dogwood.""And you?" Giles asked Kit."Stars," he said. That was all.

Sena Jeter Naslund

I will listen to a beautiful person much more quickly than a plain person, and I have to learn to be nice to people who are not attractive looking.

Outside the hospital, a young girl who was selling small bouquets of daffodils, their green stems tied with lavender ribbons. I watched as my mother bought out the girl's whole stock. Nurse Eliot, who remembered my mother from eight years ago volunteered to help her when she saw her comng down the hall, her arms full of flowers. She rounded up extra water pitchers from a supply closet and together, she and my mother filled them with water and placed the flowers around my father's room while he slept. Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful.(The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold)

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

Elizabeth Brundage

In my perception and self - awareness of life, I see the big picture ~ I see my self ~ the place of my true home ~ the home of my soul.You are the Master of your own life - The key and beauty of your soul.

Yet, he thought, if I can die saying, "Life is so beautiful," then nothing else is important. If i can believe in myself that much, nothing else matters.

I was beautiful; after all, my skin was as rich and dark as wet, brown mud, a complexion that any and every pale white girl would pray for - that is, if she believed in God. My butt sat high in the air and my hips obviously gave birth to Creation. Titties like mangoes, firm, sweet, and ready. My thighs and legs were big and powerful, kicking Vanna White and Cindy Crawford to the curb.

Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.

Haruki Murakami

He looked around at the perfectly white world, felt the wet kisses of the snowflakes, pondered hidden meanings in the pale yellow streetlights that shone in a world so whitely asleep. "Beautiful," he whispered.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A person with taste is merely one who can recognize the greatest beauty in the simplest things.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

Kisses were better than potions.

Gail Carson Levine

maybe, beauty, true beauty, is so overwhelming, it goes straight to our hearts.maybe it makes us feel emotions that are locked away inside

James Patterson

How can a deer tell when a leaf falls silent in the forest? She hears it breathing differently.

What?" I asked."Nothing," he said."Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

There is something perfect to be found in the imperfect: the law keeps balance through the juxtaposition of beauty, which gains perfection through nurtured imperfection.

Dejan Stojanovic

I preferred my brand of beauty where Norah was more beautiful than any bimbette, and Mom was beautiful whether sized extra-small or extra-large. Where Peony could look at herself in the mirror and murmur, wow, look at me. Just look at me.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

We are immensed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement.

The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night.

William Shakespeare

This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.

Maggie Stiefvater

Then I wondered, what if?What if he kissed me? What if he told me I was beautiful? What if he told me he loved me?What would I say in return?

Fortune's fool! How we humans lie upon beauty like lizards upon a sun-baked rock.

Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?

Augustine of Hippo

If women cannot eat the same food as men, we cannot experience equal status in the community.

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