Quotes About Contrast

There is something deeply surreal about standing behind a female performer in hotpink peau de soie, a woman whose clitoris and perineum you have priorly seen, and watching her try to get a microwaved egg roll onto her plate with a cocktail fork. —David Foster Wallace, "Big Red Son" (1998)

What if in fact there were ever only two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type One, always rather Two, one upside-down in a convex lens.

And then but so what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?

And girl-women, women, curved like instruments or fruit, skin burnished brown-bright, suit tops held by delicate knots of fragile colored string against the pull of mysterious weights, suit bottoms riding low over the gentle juts of hips totally unlike your own, immoderate swells and swivels that melt in light into a surrounding space that cups and accommodates the soft curves as things precious. You almost understand.

The world divides into those who like the managed induction of terror and those who don't. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying.

His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl's. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.

I don't think irony's meant to synergize with anything as heartfelt as sadness.

Right from the start, what I liked best about the analyst was that his office was a mess.

This is potentially key, I'm saying. This may be just the sort of regional politico-sexual contrast the swanky East-Coast magazine is keen for... They might ought to try just climbing on and spinning and ignoring assholes and saying Fuck 'em. That's pretty much all you can do with assholes. This could be integral.

These guys are always 25–30 and look 45–60 and are a better ad for sobriety at any cost than any ad agency could come up with.

I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one's own cabin toilet. I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music.

light sharp bitter tint

Algo en mi sangre me dice que lo que destruimos era más bello que lo que buscábamos.

Remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic there is always the comic and in the midst that which is most evil there is always much good.

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)

The prince of darkness is a gentleman!

For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lillies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

So fair and foul a day I have not seen.

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell. Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace, Yet Grace must still look so.

When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.