Quotes About Contrast

Tapping a little bell, I leaned on the desk and turned to look at a small, traditionally decorated Christmas tree on a table near the entranceway. It was complete with shiny, egg-fragile bulbs; miniature candy canes; flat, laughing Santas with arms wide; a star on top nodding awkwardly against the delicate shoulder of an upper branch; and colored lights that bloomed out of flower-shaped sockets. For some reason this seemed to me a sorry little piece.

But what could I say to her? That I'm drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe) . . . because they take me into a world (the seething builds) . . . a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch) . . . the one I'm doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething) . . . to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work . . . work . . . work?

In Oakland, he saw two slum children sword fighting on a slag heap. In Palo Alto, a puffy fop in bursting jodhpurs shouted from the door of a luxurious stable, "My horse is soiled!" While one chilly evening in Union Square he listened to a wild-eyed young woman declaim that she had seen delicate grandmothers raped by Kiwanis zombies, that she had seen Rotarian blackguards bludgeoning Easter bunnies in a coal cellar, that she had seen Irving Berlin buying an Orange Julius in Queens.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

There were plenty of white folks like that, happy to define themselves as not-quite-as-bad-as-some, conveniently surrounding themselves with awful people in contrast to whom they looked good.

The grime of living is so much more interesting than the shine of eternity, I've always thought." He

Impressions and appearances that do not correspond to reality must be contrasted with others that do correspond to reality, or else the contrast between appearance and reality is meaningless.

Every dance you know is an anti-grammar of another dance you do not know.

Contemporary Las Vegas is astonishing. At night, it is a brilliant cluster of jewels of all shapes, sizes, and colors, glowing in the middle of a vast, black velvet canopy. By day, it is also an amazing sight, almost like a mirage. There is nothing but desert and rugged mountains all around, and then--in the middle of it all--one of the largest and fastest growing cities in the United States ... truly an enigma.

To compare other things with God, is to debase Deity; as if you should compare the shining of a glow-worm with the sun. 3.

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

Camila had intended to be perfunctory and if possible impudent, but now she was struck for the first time with the dignity of the old woman. The mercer's daughter could carry herself at times with all the distinction of the Montemayors and when she was drunk she wore the grandeur of Hecuba.

en todo hay dos polos o aspectos opuestos, y que los "opuestos" son realmente sólo los dos extremos de la misma cosa, con una variación de grado entre ellos.

Bien y mal no son sino los polos de la misma cosa

Everything is dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.

like a drop of ink in a glass of milk

Without the shading there is not so much depth. A poster without any shading may be brilliant and effective; but it does not have depth in it. The contrast between shadow and light gives an added dimension to the painting. So it is in the chart, recognition of the Shadow seems to intensify the highlights. (Carl Leipert)

She walked off into the night, sparkling with a clarity she'd never felt—and at the same time, carrying a dread so overwhelming that she feared it might crush her.

For the record, if I were Superman, a pale, scrawny guy holding a guitar would be Kryptonite.

The world is filled with people who are no longer needed—and who try to make slaves of all of us—and they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare—and without their musical and ideological miscar-riages to compare our Song of freedom to, we'd not have any opposite to compare music with—and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we'd never knows its speed, its power.

He turned and looked up at me with the face of a needy child and the eyes of an ancient shaman.

The harsh wind of the Egyptian desert is even worse than the harsh wind of the Egyptian pharaoh.

A strip club is one of the few places where two groups voluntarily come together who have such precipitous contrasts in net worth and familiarity with violence, each group with a head-and-shoulders edge in one category. The basic math of a tropical storm.

the residents had yet to acquire an appreciation for a South American midget screaming Spanish profanities like Frankie Valli and sucker-punching a fat woman into submission between the jacarandas.