Quotes About Contrast

I was left alone there in the company of orchids, roses and violets, which, like people who are kept waiting in a room beside you but do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more impressive, and received coldly the warmth of a glowing fire of coals, preciously displayed behind a screen of crystal, in a basin of white marble over which it spilled, now and again, its perilous rubies.

Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind and lacked imagination. He knew perfectly well as a general truth that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of each individual human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical with the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.

Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its roundness, but whose edge the sun gilded in return.

Depth of character, or a melancholy expression on a woman's face would freeze his senses, which would, however, immediately melt at the sight of healthy, abundant, rosy human flesh.

Error, by force of contrast, enhances the triumph of Truth...

Yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day!

Where glowing embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom...

As to embrace me she inclined, I waked she fled and day brought back my night.

Mustering their rage, and Heaven resembles Hell! As he our darkness, cannot we his light Imitate when we please?

their eager, childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort.

As we sat by the camp-fire the brightness of the sky brought on a long talk with the Indians about the stars; and their eager childlike attention was refreshing to see as compared with the decent, deathlike apathy of weary civilized people, in whom natural curiosity has been quenched in toil and care and poor, shallow comfort.

The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success, kid.

Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadows ceases to be enjoyed as light.

Overcome by his feelings, the Parisian threw himself upon the ground, exclaiming, in an agony of tears La bonne reine ! la pauvre reine ! Presently he sprang up, exclaiming, Cependant, Monsieur, il faut vous faire voir mon petit chien danser. This contrast, though natural in a Parisian, was unnatural in the nature of things, and therefore injurious.

We ain't in California no more," Pilate said. "Every fuckin' body up here's got a gun. Even that old lady in the hamburger shop, shot Michelle.

Mount Pleasant was an older town, where no two houses, standing side by side, seemed to come out of the same architectural style, with nineteenth-century Victorians up against pastel-colored postwar ramblers. Most of the houses had traditional flower gardens with marigolds and zinnias, and some with head-high sunflowers.

The Minneapolis City Hall is not a pretty building. A pile of red granite, a sullen nineteenth-century Romanesque lump, it squats amid the glittering glass-and-steel towers of the loop like a wart poking through a diamond necklace.

Her voice was stark as a winter crow.

sweating like a blind lesbian in a sushi bar.

The high Wisconsin bluffs on the St. Croix are such a dark green that in bright afternoon sunlight, they seem almost black.

like an ink drop falling into a coal cellar.

It was the black jellybeans that did it.

Upper lamp on lowest gain glowing down to white sheets and yellow hair and golden skin—so much gold for so little skin—and all of it, the gently rising flat tummy, the wide eyes closed or shielded or hidden, the positively dreamlike sweep of lines from throat to forehead and back again to the partial view of more yellow hair, but tufted, promising more hair and more gold . . . all of it glowing back up into the lamp, shaming it. Shaming me.