Quotes About Contrast

Boys were stunned by the size and grandeur of the West End after their background in a one-room country school. The opulence of having a teacher for each grade made a deep impression on them. It seemed wasteful. But as is true of all humans, they were stunned for one day, admiring on the second, and on the third day could not remember very clearly ever having gone to any.

Al bent over her. And he saw the bright evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.

Then the soldiers went to Mexico and it was a kind of painful picnic. Nobody knows why you go to a picnic to be uncomfortable when it is so easy and pleasant to eat at home.

Fella can get so he misses the noise of a saw mill

The first man was small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp, strong features. Every part of him was defined: small, strong hands, slender arms, a thin and bony nose. Behind him walked his opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes, and wide, sloping shoulders; and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws. His arms did not swing at his sides, but hung loosely.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing.

always found in myself a dread of west and a love of east.

Los seres humanos tienen a veces más ponzoña que las serpientes.

It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is as white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.

For supper Jill cooks a filet of sole, lemony, light, simmered in sunshine, skin flaky brown; Nelson gets a hamburger with wheatgerm sprinkled on it to remind him of a Nutburger. Wheatgerm, zucchini, water chestnuts, celery salt, Familia: these are some of the exotic items Jill's shopping brings into the house. Her cooking tastes to him of things he never had: candlelight, saltwater, health fads, wealth, class.

He sees now that he is rich that these were the [shore] outings of the poor, ending in sunburn and stomach upset. Pop liked crabcakes and baked oysters but could never eat them without throwing up. When the Model A was tucked into the garage and little Mim tucked into bed Harry could hear his father vomiting in a far corner of the yard. He never complained about vomiting or about work, they were just things you had to do, one more regularly than the other.

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

An earth hard as iron lay locked beneath a sky whose mottled clouds spit snow like ashes sucked up a chimney and then dispersed with the smoke.

She stands by the edge of the bed, baggy in nakedness, and goes off into the bathroom to do her duty. There's that in women repels him: handle themselves like an old envelope. Tubes into tubes, wash away men's dirt—insulting, really. Faucets cry. The more awake he gets the more depressed he is. From deep in the pillow he stares at the horizontal strip of stained-glass church window that shows beneath the window shade. Its childish brightness comes from years away.

The flavour of cabbage is seldom welcome in a dessert

Forget it," I said. "Opie could be bloodthirsty, rabid, radioactive, and selling life insurance and he'd still be preferable to listening to the two of you.

Well, I'd love to wear a rainbow everyday and tell the world that everything's okay / But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back / 'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black.

Under a low sun, pursued by fish and mounted by crows and veiled in a loud swarm of bluebottle flies, the body comes down the river like a deadfall stripped clean.

The spotlight is a demanding place, Fan. I have always found the shadows to be much more amenable.

Scrooge is no Marley, and Marley is no Scrooge, and their partnership is the better for it.

what's beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it's like there's too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it...

what's beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it's like there's too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it..." ? Jon Fosse

It is impossible for light to bow before darkness.

The living and dead were thrown together, and the dead looked away first.-Description of Doomsday