Quotes About Beauty

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.

When a despot ineptly sought to turn a country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry? It wasn't sleeping. It kept the poets up at night. We wrote against despair toward beauty, toward a truth that could imprison us for making liars out of the fools deposited in the seats of power, kept there by puppets who kneeled in piles of promissory notes.

She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.

She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded her up like death, discordant, without logical and beautiful conclusion.

I remember when there was no urge to cut the land or each other into pieces, when we knew how to think in beautiful. (Lines from Harjo's poem Emergence.)

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple. -Fury of Rain

What we haven't imagined will one day spit us out magnificent and simple.

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich live in tall glass houses at the edge of it.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

Since thirteen, she'd been preparing. She wasn't beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. […] There were guys - older guys - she'd yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face.

Men grow cold as girls grow old And we all lose our charms in the end. How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!

There are people, primarily women!--who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth. The integrity of the spirit. He turned the page of his sketch pad and began anew, whistling thinly through his teeth. Thus an icy-cold soul, in the presence of one so blessed, can regain something of his lost self. Sometimes!

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

To seek out, to study, to immerse oneself in, surround oneself with, beauty; to be conscious of one's dependence upon those who create it or, like the performing musician, re-create it. Very little matters apart from this.

Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.

What was most striking about the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington was the aura of confidence it exuded – not merely the figure of the beautifully composed young noblewoman, her slender face seen just slightly in profile so that her elegantly long nose was outlined, but an air of ontological entitlement as different from M.R.'s sense of being in the world as if she and "Jane, Countess of Harrington" were of two distinct species.

My wish is to live a life in which emotions come slowly as clouds on a calm day. You see the approach, you contemplate the beauty of the cloud, you observe it passing, you let it go. You do not dwell upon what you have seen, you do not regret it, you are content to understand that the identical cloud will never come again—no matter how beautiful, unique, you do not weep at its loss.

yet the greening grasses and overarching elms and oaks, just beginning to come into leaf, gave the scene a picturesque air, like a fairy-tale dwelling;

she'd studied herself in mirrors half her life in despair and hope knowing it's power you need, oh, Jesus, power; if you're beautiful you'll have it over other people, over men, you'll be loved, desired, never have to die.

the swans are beautiful like figures in a dream, that seem to represent something for which there are no adequate words.

Poetry is what frightens. It is rare, and worth waiting for.

And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.

When her lover had loved her she'd been beautiful. When she'd been beautiful her lover had lover her. It was a simple proposition, a seemingly tautological proposition, yet it resisted full comprehension.