Quotes About Contrast

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes -- disease and death and the rotting of flesh.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

Mountains complement desert as desert compliments city, as wilderness compliments and completes civilization.

The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone.

The mornings therefore ....are all the sweeter in the knowledge of what the afternoon is likely to bring.

There's beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere. But when I think of where I want most to be, finally, it's the old hot dusty eyeball-searing head-aching skin-blistering throat-parching boot-burning bloody goddamned desert again. Why?

There is something about the desert that the human sensibility cannot assimilate, or has not so far been able to assimilate. Perhaps that is why it has scarcely been approached in poetry or fiction, music or painting;

The cactus of the high desert is a small, grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it in the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites.

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.

The cactus of the high desert is a small grubby, obscure and humble vegetable associated with cattle dung and overgrazing, interesting only when you tangle with it the wrong way. Yet from this nest of thorns, this snare of hooks and fiery spines, is born once each year a splendid flower. It is unpluckable and except to an insect almost unapproachable, yet soft, lovely, sweet, desirable, exemplifying better than the rose among thorns the unity of opposites

Is a man satisfied, merely because he is perfumed himself, to mingle with a malodorous crowd?

We love the beautiful and serene, but we have a feeling as deep as love for the terrible and dark.

Ron fut frappé par le contraste qui régnait entre les coulisses de la justice avec leurs cages à barreaux d'arrière-cour et la solennité très digne de la salle du tribunal. Le public voyait l'édifice, pas les communs.

So you got the cool New Yorkers, and then there are the less-than-cool New Yorkers.

When the image of her comes up on a sudden—just as my bad demons do—and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags. Selah.

How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.Youth is full of pleasance, age is full of care.

Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.

As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion.