Quotes About Contrast

To the seeing eye decay is as fair as growth, and death as life.

Yin and yang, male and female, strong and weak, rigid and tender, heaven and earth, light and darkness, thunder and lightning, cold and warmth, good and evil…the interplay of opposite principles constitutes the universe.

He was almost too tired to do that, though he knew he would regret it if he went to bed in his clothes. That was the province of the young and nonarthritic. Colin would wake refreshed in spite of digging buttons and constricting sleeves. Kivrin could wrap up in her too-thin white cloak and rest her head on a tree stump none the worse for wear, but if he so much as omitted a pillow or left his shirt on, he would wake stiff and cramped.

Incluso ahora, anclado en estas aguas civilizadas, no olvido que la corriente que fluye tranquila lleva a los últimos confines de la tierra... al corazón de las tinieblas.

Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not.

White: We were born in such a fix as this. Suffering and human destiny are the same thing. Each is a description of the other. Black: We aint talkin about sufferin. We talkin about bein happy. White: Well you cant be happy if you're in pain. Black: Why not?

Bears that dance, bears that don't.

The spotlight kept rowing back and forth across the face of the ridge. Methodically. Bright shuttle, dark loom.

And so everything is supposed to hang on the speed of light but nobody wants to talk about the speed of dark.

The girls emerged in their carboncopy dresses and the boy came out of the woods stiffly and looking churlish and sullen and strange, like a child pervert.

Did you learn to whisper in a saw mill?

They ate on in silence, jaws working all down the table with great sobriety, all sitting upright and formal saving the toothless old woman who bent nearsightedly into her plate with smacking gums, a sparse tuft of long white chin hairs wagging and drifting above the food.

A halfman on a skatecart oared past with leather chocks.

The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

Across the yard, brilliant against the façade of pines beyond, a cardinal shot like a drop of blood.

Thats beautiful! Sad and beautiful, murmured Meggie. Why were sad stories often so beautiful? It was different in real life.

Beauty and fear make uneasy companions

But after all, the villains are the salt in the soup of a story.

What was this yearning, tearing at her insides like hunger and thirst? It couldn't be love. Love was warm and soft, like a bed of leaves. But this was dark, like the shade under a poisonous shrub, and it was hungry. So hungry. It must have some other name, just as there couldn't be the same word for life and death, or for moon and sun

Life is so simple when you're young, though of course that's not what it feels like to the young.

Why were love and death such close neighbors?

Life seemed so much stronger than death, death so much stronger than life. Like the ebb and flow of the tide.

The Hartliebs had no time for the snow. Outside their window, San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to be floating on the lagoon as if it had just surfaced there. The view was so beautiful that Victor felt his heart ache. Esther and her husband, however, stood side by side with their backs to the window.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red. If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. William Shakespeare, Sonnets, No. 130