Quotes About Contrast

he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee's boots crunched on. There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is. and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.

I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets... I saw him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without.

I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—

Such a pretty girl- to say such wise things.

Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine.

Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.

I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before — and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and show what we are made of. Sometimes I wish I'd been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

Her face, ivory gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain…

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

I like these streets... I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad

Just as Daisy's house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter color of the room.

Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty.

Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it

Back at two o'clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo's girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see.

She was sorry, and rather revolted at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual to her to watch a man walking in a slow dream.

I like these streets,' observed Anthony aloud. 'I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead, grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country.

Almost impersonally he was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself; she was immeasurably sincere—of these things he was certain. Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls and débutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word's most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.

There's a difference somewhere." Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently

I'd rather look at all these famous people in—in oblivion.