Quotes About Contrast

Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn.

Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange, and she was beautiful. Beautiful like a granite cliff or a thunder-cloud.

Gos had steely pinions and a mad marigold eye, and hopped and flew and mantled his great wings over a fist of raw liver. He cheeped like a songbird and was terrified of cars. I liked Gos. Gos was comprehensible, even if the writer was utterly beyond understanding.

It seemed monstrous that people who could only afford cheap houses should find themselves automatically surrounded by ugliness.

Down at the edge of Mexican town, where the pavement gave out and the yellow dust drifted ankle-deep over the hard-packed adobe, a radio was moaning a dreamy beat into the night. It was the kind of music that needs two people, but only one was listening...

Her gingerbread keeps and keeps. It outlasts all daintier gifts. Flowers wilt and shed mottled petals, mold blooms greenish-white on chocolate truffles, and Harriet's gingerbread hunkers down in its tin, no more attractive than the day it arrived, but no more repellent either.

She had a new bracelet on, stacked with emeralds brighter than her eyes. I hate rich people.

A house of stone and glass and iron should be stark and sober, a watchtower from which a benevolent guard is kept on society. But the white stone of this particular house rippled as if reacting to a hand that had found its most pleasurable contact. A notable newspaper critic had described this effect as being that of "a pernicious sensuality." And if that wasn't enough, the entire construction blushed a truly disgraceful peachy-pink at sunset and dawn.

The incongruous combination of white hair, beard, and powerful arms usually caused boys to scatter with the muddled impression that Father Christmas was angry with them.

Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies.

The night was very stark, alternate streams of town cars and chequered taxicabs, blaring horns busily staking claims—here is the road and here is the sidewalk. But the road looked so much livelier, what if I tried the road?

Anecdotes are funny when you tell them," said Teffi. "But when you live through them it's a tragedy. And my life is one big joke-- in other words, a tragedy.

the nice bits of them can never make up for the offensively crappy parts. I

Even at its most spontaneous, [the Carmina ] has not the sudden miracle of the earliest vernacular ... It is the contrast between the thrushes in February and the violin.

Good humor is a paradox. The unexpected juxtaposition of the reasonable next to the unreasonable.

A city building, you experience when you walk a suburban building, you experience when you drive.

It's that I don't like white paper backgrounds. A woman does not live in front of white paper. She lives on the street, in a motor car, in a hotel room.

Many people say I smile more in Africa than in Sweden.

Through centuries of centuries, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyant and leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines and its surface. When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars, or is it the fire?

It is to be noted that a deserted street at four o'clock in the afternoon has as strong a significance as the swarming of a square at market or meeting times.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.

From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.

The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.