Quotes About Contrast

A farm is an irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city.

Wholly homelike was the wedge of apple pie with whipped cream, and a piece of yellow cheese beside it, sharp and dry and crumbly, just right to cut the rich sweetness of the pie filling and the buttery taste of the crust.

For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall.

The black ice of that dark fortress received the sunlight like a mortal wound.

Nothing but trouble outside my head; nothing but miracles inside it.

Death and life were just adjacent verandas.

los paraísos artificiales acaban en infiernos naturales...

I permit myself this one generalization: Americans have mastered the universe, but have no dominion over their mouths; whereas India is impotent, but her children tend to have excellent teeth.)

So he was a sort of anti-Scheherazade, Dunia told him, the exact opposite of the storyteller of The Thousand Nights and One Night: her stories saved her life, while his put his life in danger.

But the jungle, like all refuges, was entirely other - was both less and more - than he had expected.

When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don't impinge on you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don't look like dormitories.

And look at the stains on the carpets, janum; for two months we must live like those Britishers? You've looked in the bathrooms? No water near the pot. I never believed, but it's true, my God, they wipe their bottoms with paper only! …

The light of the fire dying in the water like a dream being forgotten.

I have lived twice as long as I should have," the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, "and I've never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the Devil's work.

The person who proclaimed me Best Dressed Man never saw me in my sport outfit.

someone like Grace. Someone exactly like Grace, with her Ted Bundy rantsand her calming presence and—hello, irony.

To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.

Character is a strange blending of flinty strength and pliable warmth.

Modesty is to merit, what shade is to figures in a picture; it gives it strength and makes it stand out.

In this world is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man.

...you think so logically...like a hawk soaring - I feel so chaotically...like a kite without a tail plummeting to earth...

The strongest words can be said in the softest voices and still be resonant.

Ah, you noticed that black sheep on the hills aren't nearly as plentiful as the white. They're a particularly hardy lot.

When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success, but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it's just wonderful.