Quotes About Contrast

She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.

I call the right axe Sorrow," she said. "You know what I call the left one?" "Happiness?" "Sorrow. I can't tell them apart.

Maybe he was the anti-Santa, of the South Pole, and he was going to show them where the elves made lumps of coal for Anti-Christmas.

He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world–he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.

A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.

If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.

Chaos, illumined by flashes of lightning.

The worst Persian voluptuary could never have imagined my most ordinary day.

unwed mothers nursing unbaptised infants on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange

There were happy days, with watermelon, and sad days of whiskey.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.

Sometimes I liken the comedian's lifestyle a little bit to a firefighter's in the sense that there's a lot of waiting and a lot of nothingness. And then there are moments of urgent firefighting.

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.

Cigarettes are an instant signifier in culture. It punctuates a joke, or puts that extra zing on a punch line. I like them as a prop. I think it can be really useful for character and texture and contrast and all of that.

I think a good dollop of sadness is quite a useful thing in comedy sometimes. I think if everyone's happy all the time, it's a bit dull. It's like salt and caramel - you wouldn't imagine they would go well together, but they do.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

A single Dallas Cowboys football game uses up as much electricity as the entire nation of Liberia in those same three hours - one reason the globe, if looked at from a certain height, is a cluster of lights surrounded by enormous patches of dark.

Death metal uses a lot of white face paint and black hair dye to make its point. I quite enjoy this genre for its intensity, extremism and underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it.

Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.

The experience of using a Rolleiflex camera is very different than using a SLR.

Delhi gives you a lot of love. Bombay people don't care much because it's usual for them to see a TV serial guy or a movie actor.

It's funny - when you look at the real A-listers nowadays, look at how many live in and around Hollywood. Most of them live on a ranch in Utah. It's no coincidence these guys get in and get out.

The media in Utah is not the same as the media in New York, so that can wear on some people.

Lifestyle-wise, like L.A. in general, Utah is very conservative, very laid back, and L.A. is nothing like that.