Quotes About Contrast

You've always been stone solid until now, like Joe Friday with no Y chromosome. Now you're Nancy Drew on a sugar rush.

It's a beautiful, terrible, world, isn't it?

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.

A two-dollar pump. A bitch. A scuz. But gorgeous.

She's not seen it a tenth this bright on any previous night.

However, as there is no end to the beauty that some can create, so there also is no end to the horrors that others

Better than a peanut butter and onion sandwich?

About sixty feet ahead, Chang ran along a surfline of gray shadows, where the waves of light dissolved against the shore of night.

If this is a lonely life, it is also colorful.

Only the human monster knew beauty and rejected it, knew truth and disdained it, knew peace and did not prefer it, unlike the tiger and the wolf who knew not.

Where an owner showed pride in his home, the fresh paint, the upright picket fence, the well-barbered shrubs only emphasized the debris, decay, and dilapidation that characterized the surrounding properties. Each island of order did not offer hope of a community-wide transformation, but instead seemed to be a dike that could not long hold back an inevitably rising tide of chaos.

They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness. —T. S. ELIOT, Choruses from The Rock, VII

I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, but now I want a Russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping.

Thomas Jefferson took one look at permissive Parisian women and, comparing them to pious American maidens, declared: "A comparison of amazons to angels!" (Too bad he didn't live long enough to meet Britney Spears.)

Admittedly, my focus is on the most redeeming qualities of these creatures, but the exercise here is not to glorify or ennoble them; rather, it is, as Descartes implied, to contrast cultural values in the hopes that we might see our own in a new light.

Look. Isn't he beautiful? Drew's expression softened. Ah, Nellie. He's bald, pink, and has no teeth. What's so beautiful about that? Nellie's laugh tinkled out like musical chimes while she covered the babe back up.

Again from a distance, Sukie was once again struck by her mother's chic and how different things can seem from far away, how there's more than one truth, the faraway truth and the truth close up.

Nothing is duller than a progression of common chords. One wants some contrast, which breaks up the clear white light and makes it iridescent.

I don't think much of these eccentrics. Some people turn them into familiar acquaintances, even friends. Once a year they interest me, when I meet them, because their character stands in contrast to others and they break that fastidious uniformity which our education, our social conventions, and our habitual proprieties have introduced.

I have one ship and they call me a pirate. You have a fleet and they call you an Emperor. I can't remember who said it.

One night Shay heard the quiet murmur of his voice, punctuated by Olivia's giggles. She shuffled across the living room and listened around the corner. He was reading aloud to her, imitating each character's voice. Shay listened to his falsetto, a grin tugging her lips at the incongruity of a cowboy reading The Princess Diaries.

the house looked shoddy in comparison with its neighbors. It stood out in the elegant street of terraced houses like a meatball in caviar.

You do not want to be a noble person? She held her thumb and index finger close together. A little bit? He shook his head. I've gt nothing against noble people, I've just noticed they rarely live past forty. Neither do gangsters. True, he said, but we eat in better restaurants. (Live By Night - Dennis Lehane)

I'd like to say I found a sublime beauty in it all, but I didn't. And yet. And yet, this life we'd built filled our car