Quotes About Contrast

The disparity between outward appearances and inner disposition had disturbed me all my life.

Despair is so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannekin in the window. It could be dispelled by the lights surrounding a tower. It would be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. Meaningless, I almost said, aloud.

People played with fact and fancy. Waitresses wrote novels at night that would make them famous. Laborers fell in love with naked movie queens in rented cassette films. The rich wore paper jewelry, and the poor bought tiny diamonds. And princesses sallied forth onto the Champs Elysées in carefully faded rags.

An alien calm crept slowly over me. It was dark, full of bitterness and growing fascination.

what I felt was inexpressible gratitude for the music, that in this horror there could be something as beautiful as that.

So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting?

Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.

It was the darkness exploded, the darkness molten, and the beauty of it was like the glow of smoldering coals; just enough illumination to show how much darkness there really was.

She would have been gorgeous if someone had thrown her into a waterfall and held her there for half an hour and I told her so silently.

He sat relaxed, one knee up, arms folded, face clear one moment in a flash of flame and pale the next. He was soiled all over, and seemed rather limp and in a strange misery of ease. His expression was neither bitter nor sarcastic, only thoughtful-fixed with an enduring expression just as the faces on the mosaics were fixed as they bore lifeless witness to the same events.

I feel the darkness near me; I feel the light shining. And more keenly I feel the contrast between the two. Until

Si soy un ángel, píntame con alas negras.

Her narrow oval face was so like his and yet so not. He had never been so divorced from feeling, never so abstract in his anger as she was now.

Rosse eran le labbra, lo sguardo forte, gialle come l'oro le chiome torte, bianca la pelle qual lebbra fatale, l'Incubo era lei, VITA-NELLA-MORTE, che fredda addensa il sangue mortale.

It struck me how different were his green eyes from hers. His eyes were darker. There was no distinct circle of blackness around the irises and, indeed, the pupils did not stand out so clearly. Nevertheless they were beautiful eyes.

I wanted those waters to be blue. And they were not.

beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and beauty then was a horrid irony?

Of course the cameo said nothing of my height of six foot four inches, that my hair was jet black, my eyes blue, or of the fact that I was slight of build. I had the kind of long thin fingers which were very good for the piano, which I played now and then. I played now and then. And it was my height that told people that in spite of my all too precious face and feminine hands, I really was a young man.

What stars are these that sing so beautifully when all the world is languishing in dissonance?

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

the villa) It's beautiful too, all hot pinks and reds, and rocks and sand and blinding blue and white.

It was what Trinity was all about: training you to be British and then insisting instead that you be Southern.

She had the underwear of a thirteen-year-old, as well, he thought. He glanced back at her. But the shoes of a courtesan.

Chloe took a sip of her coffee. Strong as faith, sweet as love, black as sin.