Quotes About Contrast

We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England.

Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.

A blush rose to my face. I fixed my eyes on the Pavement. The Other was so neat, so elegant in his suit and his shining shoes. I, on the other hand, was not neat. My clothes were ragged and faded, rotten with the Sea Water I fished in. I hated drawing his attention to this contrast between us, but nevertheless he had asked me and so I must answer. I said, 'What changed was that I used to have shoes. Now I have none.

In a war one is either living like a prince or a vagabond. I

The walls were hung with a series of gigantic paintings in gilded frames of great complexity, all depicting the city of Venice, but the day was overcast, a cold stormy rain had set in, and Venice – that city built of equal parts of sunlit marble and sunlit sea – was drowned in a London gloom.

Its surface repelled Water, like something meant to live in Air.

The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.

He would take refuge in a homey understanding of Faroese ways only to be slapped back to an uncomfortable position as an American by some terrible smell: uncomfortable because he could no more now imagine himself standing at an oak door with a brass knocker, wearing a tie and holding a bottle of Médoc, than he could picture eating rotten meat. He was floating around in cultural hyperspace; nothing felt right.

He was so easygoing, she forgot he could be deadly. And startling as his anger was, it gave her another key to understanding him.

She supposed a properly bred London lady would be expected to faint in shock at the sight of a shirtless gentleman, but he looked far too delicious for her to close her eyes.

She's upset. Screaming upset? or crying upset? Does it matter? Yes. There's a difference between being mad at a guy and being a teary mess over him. For example: Deanna is mad and can plot your destruction; I was a teary mess and could barely crawl out of bed every day.

Eva: You like 'em tall and skinny Gideon: Last I checked, the wife I can't resist was petite and voluptuous. Spectacularly so

I pushed up into her face. "You got the fairy tale right. But Gideon's the beauty. I'm the beast.

Nie zuvor hatte ich so tiefschwarzes Haar gesehen. Dicht und glänzend reichte es ihm bis zum Kragen - eine sexy Länge, die dem erfolgreichen Geschäftsmann das Aussehen eines Bad Boy verlieh, wie Schlagsahne auf einem Schokobecher.

What I discovered was that Jean-François Giroux was a really good-looking guy. Hot, actually. Not as hot as Gideon, but then who was? Gideon was in a league by himself, but Jean-François was a head-turner in his own right, with dark wavy hair and eyes the color of pale jade. He was tan and had a goatee, which really worked for him. He and Corinne made a stunning couple.

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B. Once you were beautiful.

It's like watching paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction - every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

I am both worse and better than you thought.

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won't notice. My heart is a stopped geranium.

Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

to learn that while you dream and believe in Utopia, you will scratch & scrabble for your daily bread in your home town and be damn glad if there's butter on it