Quotes About Contrast

How can this beautiful world contain such ugliness as I have seen?

The sidewalks swarmed with people, the night was full of the noises of the living. They struck Miss Clarvoe's ears strangely, like sounds from another planet.

That porch is a happy-looking place, and my father - burdened, stoop-shouldered, cadaverously thin - doesn't seem to belong on it.

looked out of her window at the road below and the glimpse of the Strand beyond. Buses and cars tore noisily by, and people jostled on the pavements. Life was down there, bustling and real: love, death, birth, misery and vice; and some joy, she supposed.

i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people

patched red and white

Albert Campion: 'I'm serious!' Lugg: 'That's unhealthy in itself.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.

The tattoo attracts and also repels precisely because it is different.

A pale, thin, small woman, perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed, without makeup, without a single piece of jewelry, ascetic (viperous?) (her heart sullied by the world's contagion?) stands beside Eduardo, making him gigantic: she smiles mechanically.

Todo viaje hombre adentro tiene su contrapartida, es decir, el viaje mujer afuera.

Life and death aren't as different from each other as I thought they were. This isn't like walking into a new country. This is like walking into a new room in the same house. This is like sharing a hallway and the same row of framed family pictures, but there's a glass wall between.

instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: "I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?

My dear, you will be woefully disappointed if in my story you expect any thing like a novel. I once heard a general say, that nothing was less like a review than a battle; and I can tell you that nothing is more unlike a novel than real life. Of all lives, mine has been the least romantic.

Here it is enough to say that one should proceed from few stimuli strongly contrasting, to many stimuli in gradual differentiation always more fine and imperceptible.

When they're all here and they're loud and fighting, you wish for just a little bit of peace. Then they all leave at the same time, and the silence rips you apart.

the image of the Good Life long ago stamped on her soul was quite different from this, and she suffered in contrast.

Why do we have such a finite capacity for pleasure but an infinite one for pain?

No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles ». No swan, with swart blind look askance and gondoliering legs, so fine as the chintz china one with fawn- brown eyes and toothed gold collar on to show whose bird it was. Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth candelabrum-tree of cockscomb- tinted buttons, dahlias, sea-urchins, and everlastings, it perches on the branching foam of polished sculpture flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead.

America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof-readers, no silkworms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grassless, linksless, languageless country in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand, but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

paraphrasing from chapter 8) you must adjust to the culture established by the power [..] contrast between flexibility & ingenuity compared to structure & consistency. the former is about exploring new ideas and changing plans, the latter is about delivering on time(structured timelines, due dates) and in budget

But fear and fascination are yokefellows, oxen out of step but pulling in the same direction...

You take romance - I'll take Jell-O.

I eat at this German-Chinese restaurant and the food is delicious. The only problem is that an hour later you're hungry for power.