Quotes About Beauty

I've always thought of beauty therapy, 'alternative' treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels - for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched.

Make no mistake, most women are well aware that they've never had it so good when they enter a spa or salon, it is purely a hair/nails thing, a prelude to an evening of guilt-free fun.

Women, more often than not, do things which aren't remotely relaxing but are all about preening, which is just another sort of work.

I am firmly of the opinion that women who make a lot of effort to hang onto their looks in middle age (unless they are beauties, entertainers or prostitutes) are rather sad, as one should surely have something more substantial to recommend one by this time, such as kindness or cleverness.

What I find most upsetting about this new all-consuming beauty culture is that the obsession with good looks, and how you can supposedly attain them, is almost entirely female-driven.

Youth, health, wealth and beauty are meant to be fuel, to be burned in pursuit of pleasure, and not fruit to be pickled in anticipation of some future famine. (Hang on a minute and I'll get my sequins out and give you a quick rendition of 'My Way')

the hill. "Gosh," she murmured,

She runs her hands over her hipbones and her ribs, stark even under her nightgown, and she thinks about how crazy she was not to appreciate it. How stupid she was all her life not to eat the French Fries and vanilla Cokes. As if her slimness and beauty were the most valuable things she could ever own.

A woman can't do anything about her appearance. Either she's pretty or she isn't. But her character is quite another matter.

I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.

Why can someone get so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick? It's like the world's longest exorcism. It doesn't make sense that I can chat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billions of dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollars to just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure out how to cure cancer without torturing people.

It was like love, he thought, this crumbling chapel: it has been complicated, and therefore perfected, by what time had done to it

It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze.....They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon.

It's getting better generally, daily, especially in TV, for women in acting and age and looks count less. As more women come into the business. Change of any sort takes a long time to happen.

The presence of a single bird can change everything for one who appreciates them.

You could do worse than to spend your days staring at blue jays.

Barn swallows, like phoebes, are worth it. Watch swallows skim low over the lawn in the sidelight of a summer evening; watch a phoebe whirl out to snap up a passing crane fly, then fetch up on a dead branch, and then imagine the scene without their spark.

There's nothing that people rebel more against, I told Jacques, than being forced to acknowledge the secret and immediate power their fellow human beings have over them. There's maybe nothing more common, routine. A savage power, as indifferent as a thunderbolt, where intellect, merit, beauty, language are nothing but animal electricity, a polarity that suddenly develops. Falling under the spell. Forever. We never talk about it—it's taboo.

It has become somewhat trite, nowadays, to say that after so many years of destruction it is a kind of miracle that Paris is still standing, a miracle we thrill to every day. But if the beauty of Paris has survived wars, how extraordinary that it can do nothing against the pickaxes of the Parisians themselves when they make up their minds to demolish something, nor against the vagaries of their architects left to their own devices!

La beauté est un prodige qu'un rien peut anéantir et qui ne devrait s'admirer que de loin, elle s'efface d'une manière aussi difficilement explicable que sa présence même et l'homme n'y porte jamais qu'une main sacrilège.

and at that point the church quietly articulated these words, which tell us something of the secret of old buildings: 'The worse I am threatened, the lovelier I become.

The beautiful must be incongruous.

How could you not know?" His voice was full of wonderment. "You changed me utterly. You were like a...like a bright, wonderful bloom in a garden full of weeds. Like a graceful capital on a page of plain script, a letter decorated with the deepest, finest colors in all Erin. Like a flame, Caitrin. Like a song.

Stronger than iron crueler than death sweeter than springtime it lives beyond breath