Quotes About Contrast

Enjoyment is always greatest when you have enough contrast to measure it by.

The sky was as blue as a stupid postcard, and the islands were as green as islands.

I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you'd stumble on them--these princes of the air on common rooftops--the rivers that burst through the city streets so they ran like canals--the rabbits in parking garages--the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.

Meili pitchers herself in Heaven Township again, sitting in a safe and peaceful yard, knitting quietly while inhaling deep breaths of the chemicals that prevent women conceiving. She doesn't know how long it will take to travel from the fertile mountains of Nuwa to the sterile fields of Heaven Township, but at least she now has a sense of where happiness lies.

Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.

He'd been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?

He laughed lightly, but his eyes told another story. Ambury could smile ever so amiably while the daggers within his wit sliced one to shreds.

It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright were they dull.

He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight.

Now that I knew who she was, such meekness looked absurd on her, like a great eagle trying to hunch down to fit inside a sparrow's nest.

It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright where they were dull.

despite the Turks' friendliness, most of the exiles soon left Istanbul. No opportunities existed there for them, and Turkey seemed an alien land. Private individuals proceeded to western Europe, French visas being most sought after. Russians still regarded Paris as the center of civilization, especially in contrast to the ferocious Stone Age into which Russia had fallen, or to the sleepy lands of the former Ottoman Empire.

He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.

His wife, Gerry, was a truly stunning blonde in her middle twenties, tall and gracious, but with eyes just a little cold to match a smile so warm and welcoming.

In spite of the air conditioning, she had filled the lounge with a faint sharp-sweet odor of large overheated girl.

The structure looked as though a pagoda had been mated with Mount Vernon, then boarded up and used as a proving ground for neon tubes.

between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground.

Such afternoons the buses are crowded into line like elephants in a circusparade. Morningside Heights to Washington Square, Penn Station to Grant's Tomb. Parlorsnakes and flappers joggle hugging downtown uptown, hug joggling gray square after gray square, until they see the new moon giggling over Weehawken and feel the gusty wind of a dead Sunday blowing dust in their faces, dust of a typsy twilight.

in this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.

While his bread remains sweet, his novels may be as bitter as he likes.

But dying is a pleasure / When living is a pain.

Described Washington as a community of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

A thousand violins cloy very rapidly without percussion.