Quotes About Contrast

There was something exquisite and poetic about those fucking catastrophes.

A hundred canes shattered in the sun, like a load of antihistamines falling out of an airplane.

Opposites are attracted when each one is anxious about its own character.

America is one of the few places in the world where a "poor" person can still be obese.6

Good Story Loves Contrast

It's this contrast that keeps the audience on their toes and paying attention. It's as though the story works like this: Scene one (+): Our hero really wants something. Scene two (-): But the opportunity to get that something has been taken away. Scene three (+): An opportunity arises that might help the hero get what they want. Scene four (-): But that opportunity falls through.

We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me. Don, the Bible is so good with chocolate. I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It is a chocolate thing. We

If a positive scene followed by a negative scene is how enthralling movies work, then why not follow the same formula on our website?

After all, the purpose of negative stakes in a story is to contrast with the happy ending we all want to experience.

The reality is, what writers write and the way they live can be as different as a lump of coal and a diamond. The written life is shined to a deceptive gloss.

The man looked to be about the same age as Paola, though he clearly had a harder time getting there...His nose was flat, as though it had once been broken, and his eyes were sad, as though his heart had been. He looked like a stevedore who wrote poetry.

He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a glancing sun-struck instance that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature--fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.

and yet isn't it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn't quite work, that's oddly the dearest?

It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.

With the news about Andy, it was like someone had thrown an x-ray switch and reversed everything into photographic negative, so that even with the daffodils and the dogwalkers and the traffic cops whistling on the corners, death was all I saw: sidewalks teeming with dead, cadavers pouring off the buses and hurrying home from work, nothing left of any of them in a hundred years except tooth fillings and pacemakers and maybe a few scraps of cloth and bone.

By happy contrast, Hobie's whole day revolved around dinner.

he was about as erotic as an old football coach.

I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.

They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters?ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit's perfect but it won't last, it's about to go. And see here especially," she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, "this passage?the butterfly." The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. "How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.

It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.

never the way it seems—all good, all bad.