Quotes About Paradox

The world stood pinned on two thorns. One was ugliness. One was beauty. The truth did not lie in the middle or at either extreme. The truth encompassed both. *

So it is with all beauty," she said cheerfully. "Every glory also shits.

For one thing, while humans traditionally divided themselves up into lovers and fighters, I considered myself living evidence that that was a false binary, having no skill with either set of tools.

It was perfectly possible to love someone objectly when you could barely stand to be in the room with them. Of all the mysteries of life, Sebastien thought, that one might be the greatest.

He plays the white and black pieces both, a double game that defies all understanding.

Every question is the answer to someone else's dilemma.

Maybe you could feel all sorts of things, all of them mutually contradictory.

Humans were interesting to Nova, and perhaps the most interesting things about them was their contradictions-so fragile and so tenuous.

He looks nothing like he did. But he is still ruined and still beautiful.

I do not understand why he takes payment to protect us from himself.

The cosmic irony of the moment didn't elude him.

Who would have thought three separate peaces so irreconcilable?

Even if one were tempted to literary interpretations such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female --such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

It seemed to her that while people were very happy, individual persons were surely damned. So, she shrank from that specious mystery the individual throws about himself, from Anna's smiles, from Lilian's tomorrows, from the shut-in room, the turned-in heart.

Life is intricate. Not everything can be categorized into neat generalities, even in our spiritual life. Yes, the circumstances of life are the result of our good and not-so-good thoughts, words and deeds come full circle. But not always.

Yes—what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

A man who is so cunning that he is sometimes stupid.

It is ironic that the very ties that bind a husband and wife in theory- home and family- often serve to separate them in fact.

How right- how incredibly, utterly right- and how impossible!

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid own his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn.

Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.

I'm still happy," said Marianne. "One can be happy and miserable both at once, you know.

A fair woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatory to the purse, and a hell to the soul.