Quotes About Contrast

That's why for Zakk Wylde's Black Label Society the colors are black and white. There are no gray issues. Life is black and it's white. There's no in-between.

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.

unrelieved black set off her pale skin and exquisite bone structure. Her

Though the mass of mankind is a cacophony of fools, oafs, tyrants, and zealots, from that noise can arise the most beautiful of notes.

He said maybe irony is the lens through which we see the picture in reverse

a saint with the heart of a devil, or a fiend with the soul of a saint.

The human mind is one-sided. It can never grasp all of reality at once. When we look at things we see either the features which they have in common or the features that distinguish each of them.

It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.

recognizing that I had understood something that evening: the banality of one's own death, so much less terrible than the death of someone you love;

That difference is reflected in the two heroes.

Once I heard Dantly tell Welton that the Native Americans used to call that particular part of the morning "between the wolf and the dog" because the sky is so deep blue and spooky or whatever that you can't tell what's what. Is that a wolf on that hill or a dog? A man or a monkey? A saint or the devil?

Human enjoyment was a fragile skin drawn over a great depth of potential misery

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten'?" He laughed again. "Racine has his moments, sure, but you can't beat Shakespeare for the really grisly stuff.

Kate and Kendrick were those rare English bureaucrats who lived in the future not the past, something that no one in Ireland ever did.

The air was so cold, they could barely catch their breath. The sky was saturated as blue as India ink, without a star in sight. Enza thought no place on earth could be colder than the Italian Alps, but now she knew she just had never been to Minnesota.

Two families—one side wears tuxedos and holds a gas can, the other wears a frilly gown and holds a match.

ugly plumage

We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.

Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected.

And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey's coat and his face.

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

Thunderstorms were what death, and dramatic events, generally should be like, but usually were not; the idea that our life's dramas rarely look as dramatic as they are. Our most cataclysmic moments are typically free of gravitas, of necessary thunder; a person dies, but instead of the sky darkening and lightning striking, the sun continues to shine and the birds to sing.