Quotes About Contrast

because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good?

I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless and old.

An indistinct cacophony blanketed the area like fog: people shouting into mobile phones, street-stall hawkers exhorting potential customers, cars and horns and jackhammers. A couple of pigeons soared from one rooftop to another, flapping their wings in seeming laughter at the seething mass below.

But then, as seemed always to be the case when she found herself hit by a wave of happiness, or joy, or delight, there was an immediate undertow of sadness.

In some ways, the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.

And what counterfactual thinking does is establish a contrast between a person's actual experience and an imagined alternative.

In Galatians 4:14 Paul is not contrasting Christ with an angel; he is equating him with an angel.

Whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion

Shiny happy people don't hold guns in their laps that way.

Black is the absence of light, but white is the absence of memory, the color of can't remember.

Things with the power to scare the living shit out of you on a thundery midnight in most cases seem only interesting in the bright light of a summer morning.

I felt as conspicuous as a baby whale in a goldfish pond.

The body was far smaller than the heart it had held

Humor is almost always anger with its makeup on, I think, but in little towns the makeup tends to be thin.

It was the furthest thing in the world from the rosy-fingered dawn of poetry and old Technicolor movies; this was an anti-dawn, damp and as pale as the cheek of a day-old corpse.

Compared with the 20 million motorcars in the United States, cars and trucks in the Soviet Union numbered perhaps 5,500

It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself: and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have had her arrested for assault.

He passed them out to the class, the picture of the young woman to one side of the room and the picture of the old woman to the other.

Involuntarily, she stopped, jerked up her head, looked around her like a frightened woman. They weren't car horns: they were wind instruments

The difference between a cow and a bean is a bean can begin an adventure.

So, while fitting in, she was like a wicked detail standing out against a placid background.

If there were a silent observer, Mirabelle would be seen as a carefree, happy girl who is preparing for a night on the town. But in reality, these activities are the physical manifestations of her stillness.

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Rouge et Noir