Quotes About Subtlety

There is beauty in the least beautiful of things.

Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. Be unimportant. Blend in.

Paul was blandness itself, just tinged with pink.

We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position.

I don't know what sex appeal is. I don't think you can have sex appeal knowingly. The people who seduce me personally are the people who seem not to know they're seductive, and not to know they have sex appeal.

If you want someone to miss you, go secretly and spray your fragrance somewhere.

Yoga practice can make us more and more sensitive to subtler and subtler sensations in the body. Paying attention to and staying with finer and finer sensations within the body is one of the surest ways to steady the wandering mind. (39)

We are true to our name. We're somewhat beneath the surface, and I think well always be to a certain extent.

I believe every editor should stand to edit. That's just my particular soapbox. Some things are so delicate and depend on such fine, delicate work. One frame in one direction or another can make such a difference and it is, in that, like brain surgery.

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake.

What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.

Oh, my dear, love isn't always the coup de foudre --the lightning strike. Sometimes it happens quietly, so quietly you may not even notice.

Oh, my dear, love isn't always the coup de foudre --the lightning strike. Sometimes it happens quietly, so quitely you may not even notice.

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

Irony, when delivered cold and shaved very, very fine, could sound like amusement.

Me gusta ver cómo se esfuerza por mantenerse sobria y pálida y por parecer fría. En esas ocasiones hay en ella algo tan seductor que desafía la descripción.

There is a rare gentleness in you, the sweeter for its brief appearances.

We discovered that the scrupulously strict were correspondently keen to discern suggestions of sex where nobody else would think of looking for them.

Simplicity! He is as simple as a spider's web.

I was not giving you a heated look." "What do you call it then?" "I was merely appreciating your, ah…finer points." "Yes, well, I could do the same for you except—" "Except what?" "They are all under the desk.

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests

She... applied makeup, enough to have made an effort, not enough to be blatantly a woman...