Quotes About Contrast

And she looked back out of her sallow Jewish mask, the line of her mouth dead straight between the curving lips, the narrow eyes black.

Parvati's oriental ability to see that everything was, from a certain point of view, everything else, baffled and charmed his Aristotelian western mind.

Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.

Eros and Thanatos: a false pair and a true pair.

Her mum thought gourmet cooking was putting a load of fish fingers under the grill instead of in the frying pan.

Because whatever I hear outside, cars scrunching down the narrow, council-house streets, sometimes sweeping their headlights across this fusty old room, drunks challenging or serenading the world, or the rending shrieks of cats taking their torturous pleasures, I know I won't hear that noise.

Jim has a nice life, he considers, but sometimes Frank has a hell of a lot more fun.

downtown Johannesburg just looked like a large Muirhouse-in-the-sun to

Working chappies fail to understand the minds of men of leisure

An empty stomach is better than full and grief is better than happiness.

That was how his pen finally designed his sculpture; in the center the weak, confused, arrogant, soon to be destroyed young man holding cup a loft, behind him the idyllic child, clear-eyed, munching his grapes, symbol of joy ; between them the tiger skin. The Bacchus, hollow within himself, flabby, reeling, already old; the Satyr, eternally young and gay, symbol of man's childhood and naughty innocence

there is more beauty in a harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris.

The brooding is better than the joy because even if the heart fills with happiness, it still mourns.

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night.

sipping wine while the house was falling

If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.

She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.

Hay mucha gente buena, Irina, pero es discreta. Los malos, en cambio, hacen mucho ruido, por eso se notan más.

No existe luz sin sombra, tal como no existe dicha sin dolor.

Al nacer Rosa era blanca, lisa, sin arrugas, como una muñeca de loza, con el cabello verde y los ojos amarillos, la criatura más hermosa que había nacido en la tierra desde los tiempos de pecado original.

There is no light without shadows, just as there is no happiness without pain.

La felicidad le parecía obscena ante tanta calamidad

Estaba segura de que debía ser un hombre feo, tal vez enfermo o contrahecho, porque le parecía imposible que una sensibilidad tan profunda y una inteligencia tan precisa se sumara un aspecto atrayente.