Quotes About Contrast

The sensation of being so close to another human being with whom I had not one single sensation in common left me speechless.

It was nice to have him back. It made me realize that he was probably the only genuinely nice person in the whole group. Amongst us all he stands out like a good deed in a bad world, as they say.

Ever notice that Soup for One is eight aisles away from Party Mix?

Ginger's eyes had always been beautiful, gay, sparkling, laughing, and intelligent. Now they were even more beautiful for there were sadness and pleading, an anxious questioning, in them, too.

He rubs his forehead, frustrated, then raises his eyes, one dark brown, one gray-blue—the

my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full

Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.

Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn't think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.

I didn't intend to say something unkind. I meant only that you are good at making yourself liked. The difference between you and me, always, has been that people are afraid of me and not of you.

I know I`m mean to tell you these things, but he is much worse than I am. He has the worst kind of meanness, that of superficiality.

There were entire libraries separating him and Antonio, but they were similar.

she was skinny, like a salted anchovy, she gave off an odor of wildness, she had a long face, narrow at the temples, framed by two bands of smooth black hair. But

Volevo dire solo che sei brava a farti voler bene. La differenza tra me e te, da sempre, è che di me la gente ha paura e di te no.

Toda la vida es así, unas veces tocan bofetones, otras veces tocan besos.

Lila era de una belleza casi fea, de esas que encanta a los hombres, pero que también les da miedo.

el punto de contacto entre su mundo, cada vez más pequeño, y el mío, cada ve más grande.

Cand o vedeai, emana o stralucire care parea o palma foarte violenta peste fata saraciei din cartier.

Scriveva, nelle ultime pagine, di sentirsi intorno tutto il male del rione. Anzi, buttava li oscuramente: male e bene sono mescolati e si rinforzano a vicenda. Marcello, a rifletterci, era veramente una buona sistemazione, ma il buono sapeva di cattivo e il cattivo sapeva di buono, un'amalgama che le toglieva il fiato.

Yes, Imma was consoled but only because Lila was introducing her to a permanent stream of splendors and miseries, a cyclical Naples where everything was marvelous and everything became gray and irrational and everything sparkled again, as when a cloud passes over the sun and the sun appears to flee, a timid, pale disk, near extinction, but not look, once the cloud dissolves it's suddenly dazzling again, so bright you have to shield your eyes with your hand.

What seemed to interest and absorb her most was that all that filth, all that chaos of broken limbs and dug-out eyes and split heads was then covered—literally covered—by a church dedicated to San Giovanni Battista and by a monastery of Augustinian hermits who had a valuable library. Ah, ah—she laughed—underneath there's blood and above, God, peace, prayer, and books.

In other words there were many positive judgments, but often in sharp contrast to one another, as if the reviewers hadn't read the book that was in the bookstores but, rather, each had evoked a fantasy book fabricated from his own biases.

Yo me siento como el caballero de una novela antigua que, encerrado en su armadura resplandeciente, tras acometer mil empresas prodigiosas por el mundo, se topa con un pastor harapiento, desnutrido, que sin apartarse nunca del pastizal, con portentoso coraje doblega y domina a horribles bestias con sus propias manos.

I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold surface and, visible underneath it, a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they will have to deal with.

you will see . . . Gauguin and Bernard talk now of 'painting like children' – I would rather have that than 'painting like decadents'.