Quotes About Contrast

And it came to Marcus suddenly that slaves very seldom whistled. They might sing, if they felt like it or if the rhythm helped their work, but whistling was in some way different; it took a free man to make the sort of noise Esca was making.

In my circle of friends, I've always been loud and funny and talkative. But as soon as I step out of that circle, I get very quiet and introspective. I don't want the spotlight on me.

Behind the semi-elliptical bar four cowboys who had never been near a cow sang western songs which sounded as if they had originated in the far east.

I found when I followed the driveway around to the back that behind its imposing front it was just another tract house, as if the architect had tried to combine a southern plantation mansion with the slave quarters.

On the other side of the tracks - the tracks were there - the business section wore its old Spanish facades like icing on a stale cake.

Graff was floating on his back in the pool when George Wall and I went outside. His brown belly swelled above its surface like the humpback of a Galapagos tortoise. Mrs. Graff, fully clothed, was sitting by herself in a sunny corner. Her black dress and black hair seemed to annul the sunlight. Her face and body had the distinction that takes the place of beauty in people who have suffered long and hard.

Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.

But doesn't add something to what has come before; but takes something away. At its most daring, it can feel like a Bat Turn, a 180-degree spin int the Batmobile. Make that a But Turn.

Simon is cool. You know, it's different if you ever see him around his mom. He acts totally different.

A vulgar mind is proud in prosperity and humble in adversity. A noble mind is humble in prosperity and proud in adversity.

The sun was good. The men of the llano were men of the sun. The men of the farms along the river were men of the moon. But we were all children of the white sun.

There were two kinds of physicists in Berlin: on the one hand there was Einstein, and on the other all the rest.

The toad beneath the harrow knowsExactly where each tooth point goes;The butterfly upon the roadPreaches contentment to that toad.

The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.

...smiles come best from those who weep. Lightning, then the rain-laughter.

You are a fountain of the sun's light. I am a willow shadow on the ground. You make my raggedness silky.

Having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs.

He was dropped under a streetlamp, the only person left on the bus. A patch of mauled light. Gritty pavement, scarred with a million cigarette burns. Weeds and spit and oil. Place like this, the only glitter was the knife just before it sank in. Place like this, there wasn't any gold.

The sun snagged on his crooked skin.

It would be a dull world if it was the same everywhere

But my animals are real animals, and they behave as animals usually do. It's really the humans who do strange things. Animals are predictable. Humans, never.

Now that I was living closer to nature, I realized that this was the real world, very different from the man-made world of automobiles, computers and skyscrapers. Man was a god of sorts in his own sphere, but on a lovely mountainside he is no more important than an ant—and not half as industrious!

It would be a dull world if it was the same everywhere,' said my father.