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Quotes About Beauty

Come. I am sure that I am much prettier than your wallpaper - or your concierge. I will smile at you when you wake up. They will not.
~ James Baldwin
There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds....
~ James Baldwin
and you could see that Mrs. Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had - has - that look, that don't-you-touch-me look, that women who were beautiful carry with them to the grave.
~ James Baldwin
Life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful.
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
~ James Baldwin
Now—now, of course, I see something very beautiful in those days, which were such torture then. I felt, then, that Giovanni was dragging me with him to the bottom of the sea.
~ James Baldwin
this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.
~ James Baldwin
I missed the way the dark face closes, the way the dark eyes watch, the way the dark face opens and lights up the room.
~ James Baldwin
I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty.
~ James Baldwin
a forehead so high that it can make you think of cathedrals.
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have... One... ought to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. . . . One . . . ought to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death - ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.
~ James Baldwin
had been beautiful, and if God had not given her a spirit so demure, she might, with ironic gusto, have acted out that rape in the fields forever. Since she could not be considered a woman, she could only be looked on as a harlot, a source of delight more bestial and mysteries more shaking than any a proper woman could provide. Lust stirred in the eyes of men when they looked at Deborah, lust that could not be endured because it was so impersonal, limiting communion to
~ James Baldwin
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It
~ James Baldwin
He lived, now, in time, with the roar and the stink and the beauty and the horror of innumerable men: he had been dropped onto this inferno in the twinkling of an eye.
~ James Baldwin
She is a beautiful woman. She may not be beautiful to look at, whatever the fuck that means in this kingdom of the blind.
~ James Baldwin
Ah! I am told that New York is very beautiful. Is it more beautiful than Paris?' 'Oh, no,' I said, 'no city is more beautiful than Paris'.
~ James Baldwin
He had never seen the beauty of black people before. But, staring at Ida, who stood before the window of the Harlem kitchen, seeing that she was no longer merely his younger sister but a girl who would soon be a woman, she became associated with the colors of the shawl, the colors of the sun, and with a splendor incalculably older than the gray stone of the island on which they had been born.
~ James Baldwin
she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile—
~ James Baldwin
I am proud of these people not because of their colour but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty.
~ James Baldwin
She danced out into the aisle, beautiful with a beauty unbearable, graceful with grace that poured from heaven.
~ James Baldwin
How strange and beautiful—it must be one of the few real reasons for remaining alive, of desiring to—to dance with your daughter, your son, and your wife; touching, really digging it, laughing, and keeping the beat, free
~ James Baldwin
Starlings circle in the sky, conspiring, together, and alone, unspeakable journeys into and out of the light.
~ James Baldwin