Quotes About Contrast

They lived on the surface of their days; their smiles were surface smiles, and their tears were surface tears. Negroes lived a truer and deeper life than they, but I wished that Negroes, too, could live as thoughtlessly, serenely as they.

Tokyo is a very safe city. At night it becomes quiet the way New York never does.

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.

A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced — it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.

The desert of Central California was in those days a lot like Mongolia.

there would be no surprises, and the Jacuzzi was just a big bathtub with a few extra jets of water, loud enough that it could cover over just about any cries of despair. ???? (Posted 9/8/2012)

But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.

Oh, no way, Leo said. We've been sitting in a cave and you get the luxury tent? Somebody give me hypothermia. I want hot chocolate and a parka!

He looked like those paintings of baby angels - what do you call them, hubbubs? No cherubs. That's it. He looked like a cherub who'd turned middle-aged in a trailer park.

Love and war always go together. They are the peaks of human emotion! Evil and good, beauty and ugliness

In case you're wondering, Old York looks absolutely nothing like New York. It looks older. Magnus Chase, master of description. You're welcome.

You guys are so... dark. Even if I used flash, I'm not sure it would come out. Y-yeah, Percy managed. You guys aren't photogenic.

There cannot be light without darkness, nor darkness without light. You must have the contrast for both to exist.

I looked more like Kurt Cobain than ever, except I doubt Cobain ever wore a shirt that read: WIGGLES ROCK & ROLL PRESCHOOL TOUR! The really disturbing thing was that they made shirts like that in my size.

Her perfume was a mixture of roses and tear gas.

I LIKE my rivers the way I like my enemies—slow, wide, and lazy. I rarely get what I like.

Will and Nico sat shoulder to shoulder, bantering good-naturedly. They were so cute together it made me feel desolate.

What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.

Meg gagged. I hate bugs. That made sense for a daughter of the agriculture goddess, but to me the dead ant didn't seem any grosser than the piles of garbage in which we often swam.

Authenticity is the exact opposite of what you find in some churches.

A garden, as far as Teddy could see, was nature tamed and constrained by artifice.

Barrage balloons dotted the sky like blind whales bobbing around in the wrong element.

She was wearing a skimpy top that belonged on a teenager but it revealed her neat, hard biceps (she definitely worked out) and at least she had triceps, unlike Amelia, who had the kind of swinging underarm flesh that would have made it easy for her to glide among the treetops.

white lilies, the kind you would give to a bride or a corpse.