Quotes About Beauty

Perhaps some day I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.

Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. --from Tulips, written 18 March 1961

There was a beautiful time...

I thought if only I had a keen, shapely bone structure to my face or could discuss politics shrewdly or was a famous writer Constantin might find me interesting enough to sleep with. And then I wondered if as soon as he came to like me he would sink into ordinariness, and if as soon as he came to love me I would find fault, the way I did with Buddy Willard and the boys before him.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

I, to you, am lost in the gorgeous errors of flesh.

The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star --from Death & Co.

I hadn't, at the last moment, felt like washing off the two diagonal lines of dried blood that marked my cheeks. They seemed touching, and rather spectacular, and I thought I would carry them around with me, like the relic of a dead lover, till they wore off of their own accord.

I am your opus.

I, love, I am the pure acetylene virgin attended by roses.

I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple 'lucky stones' I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel's fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath.

I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.

All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen. A far sea moves in my ear. --from Morning Song, written 19 February 1961

The sun, emerged from its gray shrouds of cloud, shone with a summer brilliance on the untouched slopes. Pausing in my work to overlook that pristine expanse, I felt the same profound thrill it gives me to see the trees and grassland waist-high under flood water—as if the usual order of the world had shifted slightly, and entered a new phase.

In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odours bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone.

The claw / Of the magnolia, / Drunk on its own secrets, / Asks nothing of life.