Quotes About Beauty

The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.

Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind's follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.

But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

Beautiful people liked to claim looks didn't matter, while throwing that currency around like novice bank robbers.

mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless. dreads. In june they are walls of white rhodendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves afflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms.

In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water.

In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.

A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here.

The jacaranda in the courtyard has put on its bloom. This purple can't be ignored, it's like a tree singing. The walk down Londres Street to the market is a concert: the small jacaranda on the the corner hums the tuning note, then all others in the lane join in.

I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.

Ugly as homemade sin.

south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make

They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom

The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.

in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.

All these brilliant colors in this hopeless place, it kills you.

Old homecoming queens never die.

Every mud puddle is surrounded by a prayer group of small blue butterflies.

They both went quiet, imagining a river of irises. Thatcher lay watching the sky through the leaves, white clouds skipping across small lenses of light. Here was a world, where he'd asked for nothing. He would escape with his life before the dust had settled on the collapse of his falling house.

The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salomé could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings.

I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And sometimes you'd see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams.