Quotes About Contrast

Emotional intelligence, the perfect oxymoron!

There's a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in

The tourist's paradox: how to find somewhere that's free of people exactly like us.

just to gloat at mum and dad's golden girl brought low. But

It may not be quite enough to find a nice inclusive Episcopal church led by Progressive White Cleric to replace the lily-white rocking megachurch led by Conservative White Guy in Jeans on Stage.

The softening strands of light dulled the ragged blossoms of the hedgerows into a smear of sameness.

The sun comes out but the rain stays put. No rainbows today. Not here.

I pulled myself up on my elbows and lay on my belly staring down into hell. There below me in the basin of Hunslet Carr, just 500 yards beneath me, was my England on the morning of Sunday 15 December in the year of Our Lord 1974, looking a thousand years younger and none the better.

although metaphor undoubtedly deals in likenesses, similarity, it also deals in unlikeness and dissimilarity.

Bad things happen in nice places, and nice things happen in bad places. But that doesn't mean the places themselves are hard to tell apart.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

One girl, Nic's friend, says how different the images are in our family's pictures and how intense each one is, but she says that Nic's heart leads into ventricles and my stream of chalk looks like a broken artery. Somehow I am crying. Nic's hand is on my shoulder.

I go back, this time to a swankier neighborhood.

The other things you don't think about are the opposite things, the things that aren't part of your background, that fall so far outside your personal experience that you don't give them a second thought.

When I hear that rain makes a sound, I will ask: does the sunshine make a noise?

But as ever in life, wherever there is tragedy, you can often find comedy.

We enjoy warmth because we have been cold. We appreciate light because we have been in darkness. By the same token, we can experience joy because we have known sadness.

The ecstasy of seeing her versus the agony of losing her, a million births and a million deaths.

Short, dark, and slight, he looks simultaneously middle-aged and prepubescent, a little worse for wear in any case with his black hair matted like a street cat and his eyes crusted over and bleary.

They say Los Angeles is like The Wizard of Oz. One minute it's small-town monochrome neighborhoods and then boom—all of a sudden you're in a sprawling Technicolor freak show, dense with midgets.

The bathroom was clean. Well, not clean, but there were no corpses in there.

Our world," he said, "is far more advanced than yours. For reasons you'll understand shortly." A thin, bony naked woman entered the room, carrying two small, white kittens. She sat one of the fluffy cats in my lap and stuffed the other down my shirt. She turned and left. "There," said the large man. "The kittens will make your sad go away.

THEY SAY LOS Angeles is like The Wizard of Oz. One minute it's small-town monochrome neighborhoods and then boom—all of a sudden you're in a sprawling Technicolor freak show, dense with midgets. Unfortunately, this story does not take place in Los Angeles.

He tried to imagine Dave walking around the streets of Tokyo. It was like picturing RoboCop in Middle Earth—