Quotes About Beauty

He pushed away from the door, catching a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror. He looked like the devil, he thought with a trace of wry amusement. And dear, sweet, murderous Emma was a Botticelli angel, ripe for debauching.

She stopped. Foolish, hurtful thoughts. Why was it that she was the one who was so cruel to herself? No one else, save perhaps her mother, long ago, had ever made her feel ugly. And last night, this morning, Kilmartyn had made her feel… radiant.

her, climbing out of the bath.

Alex Barrow's broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler's body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call him handsome, although all the women did. Really he was almost ugly, but in a stirring, thrilling way that made her shift in her seat as she thought about him.

She liked to think that she was wearing her beauty out—using it up, she liked to think. She took some satisfaction in it, like a housewife industriously making her way through a jar of something she did not enjoy, would not buy again, but couldn't just discard, of course.

She's so pretty to look at and so lighthearted, the way your mother used to be before we married. But she's not, let's say, very…cerebral. And she doesn't have your backbone, your fiber.

She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon," she'd begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she'd barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure.

When does the time come when you stand in front of your grown-up woman's mirror and feel contentment for what you see? Ever?

In the dining room, the tulips had started hanging their heads over the rim of their vase as if they were admiring their own reflections in the polished tabletop.

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence...

It's about waking up. A child wakes up over and over again, and notices that she's living. She dreams along, loving the exuberant life of the senses, in love with beauty and power, oblivious to herself -- and then suddenly, bingo, she wakes up and feels herself alive. She notices her own awareness. And she notices that she is set down here, mysteriously, in a going world.

We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

Theirs is the mystery of continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.

What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feeling save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories.

If even rock was interesting, if even this ugliness was worth whole shelves at the library, required sophisticated tools to study, and inspired grown men to crack mountains and saw crystals--then what wasn't?

People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home.

This is what I had come for, just this, and nothing more. A fling of leafy motion on the cliffs, the assault of real things, living and still, with shapes and powers under the sky- this is my city, my culture, and all the world I need.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

I smelled silt on the wind, turkey, laundry, leaves . . . my God what a world. There is no accounting for one second of it (267).

beauty and grace [in nature] are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.