Quotes About Contrast

In a world without melancholy, nightingales would start burping

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract.

Things that are indelicate can sometimes be beautiful.

to descend from bright heaven to earth, whereon there are shadows because there are hills…

One of Russia's tsars, around 1580, was known as Ivan the Terrible, and rightly so. Beside him Nero was mild.

A white handkerchief in the shade may be objectively darker than a lump of coal in the sunshine. We rarely confuse the one with the other because the coal will on the whole be the blackest patch in our field of vision, the handkerchief the whitest, and it is relative brightness that matters and that we are aware of.

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperment of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

there are shadows because there are hills.

For that little incident had impressed the three women more than might be supposed. It remained as a goblin footfall, as a hint that all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that beneath these superstructures of wealth and art there wanders an ill-fed boy, who has recovered his umbrella indeed, but who has left no address behind him, and no name.

Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.

There stood a young man who had the figure of a Greek athlete and the face of an English one...Just where he began to be beautiful the clothes started.

Appearing thus late in the story, Cecil must be at once described. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue.

was not natural that men of different characters and tastes should be intimate, and

But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning -- the city inhaling -- or the same thorough-fares in the evening -- the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face.

He looked at her as she stood by the pool's edge. She was got up smart, as she phrased it, and she reminded him of some brilliant flower that has no leaves of its own, but blooms abruptly out of a world of green.

yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time—beautiful?

It occurred to him, as he glided over the whispering lagoons, that the power of Nature could not be shortened by the folly, nor her beauty altogether saddened by the misery of such as Leonard.

Differences, eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.

Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself; the earth is explicable — from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning — the city inhaling — or the same thoroughfares in the evening — the city exhaling her exhausted air?

They reminded me somehow of the peasants in a book by Steinbeck: they were of the city, but they dressed like peasants, they looked like peasants, and they talked like peasants. Their cows were motor-driven milk floats; their tools were mop and pail and kneeling pad; their farms a forest of steel and concrete. In spite of the hairgrips and headscarves, they had their own kind of dignity. They

The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.

If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote I'd be dead

Il lui arrivait souvent de regarder les vieilles dames qui traversaient d'un pas traînant les rues de la ville là ou l'autobus menaçait et savait qu'à l'intérieur de ces corps ratatinés souriaient des visages resplendissants d'adolescentes.