Quotes About Contrast

I've always been sort of interested in the rural countryside. Things happen out there that are very strange to city dwellers.

Why is it okay to write a work of literary fiction where horrible, explicit things happen, where you can't write a book of humor where silly, explicit things are happening?

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Everyone thinks the fashion business is so glamorous. It's completely the opposite.

I think there's an awful lot of me in Big Bird, but Oscar is pretty much - I think I know how he thinks because he thinks exactly the opposite of what I think is a good way to be.

I think he's much funnier in many ways than some of the things that I've done. Because it's a little bit more layered. He's constantly trying to teach Luke what he thinks are really deep philosophical ideas, but they're really simple.

I want someone who can respectfully challenge me. I know what I believe, so there's no point in my taking on a relationship with someone who thinks like me or laughs at what I laugh at. I enjoy being with someone who can offer me the opposite.

The difference between 'Molto Italiano' and 'The Babbo Cookbook' is that the ingredient lists in 'Molto' are about half or even a third the size. In 'Babbo,' they are very long, they are very real. That's exactly how we make them in the restaurant.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.

America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.

I don't like Thomas Edison. I'm a fan of Nicolai Tesla.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.

The sharp thorn often produces delicate roses.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark's fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

Some people are near- or farsighted - I'm thorn-sighted. The thorns on the rose are in really sharp definition for me, the rose petals a little fuzzier.

Pleasure and pain, though directly opposite are contrived to be constant companions.

The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.

Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, 'Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.' Since then, I started to think differently.

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

Were I as base as is the lowly plain, And you, my Love, as high as heaven above, Yet should the thoughts of me, your humble swain,.

Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid, grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously funny, brilliant as a flowerbed, bright as a street in hell, - unsteady as swing-boat, silly as a drunkard's dream, tragic as a poem by Masefield… To have one's corner in it, to run here and there about the city, grinning like a dog - what more did one want?

The Commander was a complete contrast to his men: Roman to his arrogant finger-tips, wiry and dark as they were raw-boned and fair. The olive-skinned face under the curve of his crested helmet had not a soft line in it anywhere - a harsh face it would have been, but that it was winged with laughter lines, and between his level black brows showed a small raised scar that marked him for one who had passed the Raven Degree of Mithras.