Quotes About Contrast

The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real project.

A vida oscila, como um pêndulo, de um lado para o outro, entre a dor e o tédio.

Las religiones son como las luciérnagas, para brillar tienen necesidad de oscuridad

Margaret Kochamma's tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.

Dark of Heartness tiptoed into the Heart of Darkness.

What Larry McCaslin saw in Rahel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words' had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies.

It was hot in the church, and the white edges of the arum lilies crisped and curled. A bee died in a coffin flower.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle—the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.

with her pale Irish skin, her blushes stood out.

Strange how much simple wisdom there is to be found in the deformed head and unprepossessing carcase of your typical London cabbie.

Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

Even when they were rushing, and in Moscow there's always a kind of rush, people lack the desperation of New York.

The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. When they can be they will either blossom into a marvel or sink into decay. What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.

What sort of life have you led that you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age, about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban Grandma with her sparkly, extravagent eyewear? It's good that your parents are no longer alive.

I bought flowers this morning: needed some light but got darkness that grew blacker towards the evening.

Both life and nature are black.

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.

Part of me felt deep compassion. And another part felt like, You fucker.

I think you're healthy in certain ways, and I think you're a pathetic disaster in others.

I like the bad one better,' I said. 'She had flying monkeys, and the good one was tacky and seemed kind of dumb.

He was terrified (his word) of us becoming "isolated." What alarmed me is that his idea of isolated was much closer to my concept of ideal. If we lived on a great expanse of land, Dennis would want a grand swimming pool so that we could invite all our friends over for long, leisurely weekends. Whereas I would want a moat filled with saltwater crocodiles to keep the riffraff out. *

Not the random, seemingly drunken hand of Mother Nature herself. That crazy old bitch gave us the California Redwoods - true, but right along with it she whipped up some naked mole rat.

He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun. The skin of their arms is like a blue mist, but their shoulders are white and glowing, as if the light fell not from above, but rose from under their skin. We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder and it lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel.