Quotes About Depth

I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.

but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... (Afterward)

But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.

She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain.

In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes

At least, she continued, it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself -- she drew together her troubled brows -- but it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for.

They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

She clung to him desperately, and as he drew her to his knees on the couch she felt as if they were being sucked down together into some bottomless abyss.

In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy acquired the charm which makes some women's faces like a book of which the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in her eyes.

I'm not much to look at, replied Elizabeth, but I'm beautiful inside.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things

In Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.

This is the theory… that anything that is art… is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.

If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

All the things you can talk about in anyone's work are the things that are least important.... You can describe all the externals of a performance - everything, in fact, but what really constitutes its core. Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is what's left over after you've explained everything else.

So much road and so few places, so much friendliness and so little intimacy, so much flavour and so little taste.

Live to the point of tears.

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion.

Something deeper had to be hidden behind things.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret.... It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.