Quotes About Contrast

How strange is this combination of proximity and separation. That ground—seconds away—thousands of miles away.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

I am bored in France, especially as everyone resembles Voltaire.

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?

was odd that the French were so dignified in death but in life acted like shits squealing on each other.

Her smile is slight, like that of a little girl, and the eyes often small as if she is peering through a gun slit at a disappointing world. The hands are callused from work and rough when they touch and she is very strong. Once she grabs me from behind, puts on a choke hold and I begin to go black into unconsciousness. Then she giggles and releases her hold and light floods back into my brain and I marvel at her strength and caprice.

Constant success shows us but one side of the world adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.

Abstract love is the nosy neighbor of abstract hate; they see right into each other's windows and they always agree on everything.

Their souls may be infinitely sweet and poetic, possessed of an earnestness and bonhomie I can only envy, but their bodies, in terms of color and surface texture, resemble bridge abutments.

The black clouds make the black sea. (Les nuages noirs Font la mer noire)

The dark clouds make the black sea. (Les nuages noirs Font la mer noire)

The noise hides the silence. It does not destroy the silence. (Le bruit cache le silence. - Il ne détruit le silence.)

Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring.

With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.

REMEMBER HOW STRONG WE ARE IN OUR HAPPINESS, AND HOW WEAK HE IS IN IS MISERY!

So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!...

There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.

Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.

Spring is the time of the year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade

We think the feelings that are very serious in a man quite comical in a boy.

I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.