Quotes About Contrast

gray, black and scarlet;

He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office.

One cancels the other, and yet without one, the other is incomplete. In the first photograph, standing there in our black robes and scarves, we are as we had been shaped by someone else's dreams. In the second, we appear as we imagined ourselves. In neither could we feel completely at home.

In another Nabokov novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight , Sebastian's brother discovers two seemingly incongruous pictures in his dead brother's library: a pretty, curly-haired child playing with a dog and a Chinese man in the act of being beheaded. The two pictures remind us of the close relation between banality and brutality.

I turned on the flashlight; it cut a small circle of light from the darkness around me.

Manna used to say that there are two Islamic Republics: the one of words and the one of reality.

I tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell—that was one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too. The two pictures collided, leaving me tongue-tied.

Los sacerdotes que predican el pensamiento positivo en Estados Unidos seguramente se quedarán desolados si ven que se habla de ellos en el mismo capítulo (y hasta en el mismo libro) que de los censores y propagandistas del estalinismo.

the pale pinks and greens of the sixties tract houses visible above them. One house, defiant heliotrope, stood out among them like a biker at a CPA convention.

When you've learned to both see and not see the resemblance, then you see the uniqueness.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal.

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.

If you are one of the few that still hasn't been, let me tell you what a city is. A hot mess not easily escaped.

For a minute the Sun came out, while it was snowing. People say that means the devil is beating his wife.

Storm in a shot glass type of thing. And Angus was the opposite. A whole ocean, dark and chill.

All these brilliant colors in this hopeless place, it kills you.

The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salomé could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings.

If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top.

Even a spotted pig looks black at night.

There was room in Adah for nought but pure love and pure hate. Such a life is satisfying and deeply uncomplicated.

The dark, finely arched brows that contrasted so strikingly with his pale blond hair were raised high, in the same expression with which he confronted a hostile witness.