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Quotes About Elegance

He's at ease, his body sculpted to the music, his shoulder searching the other shoulder, his right toe knowing the left knee, the height, the depth, the form, the control, the twist of his wrist, the bend of his elbow, the tilt of his neck, notes digging into arteries, and he is in the air now, forcing the legs up beyond muscular memory, one last press of the thighs, an elongation of form, a loosening of human contour, he goes higher and is skyheld.
~ Colum McCann
Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
~ Colum McCann
Women in long dresses, aloof and elegant, the mark of bonnet ribbons still on the soft of their necks.
~ Colum McCann
the black, two-wheeled
~ Vince Flynn
Are we not acceptable, moon? Are we not lovely sitting together here, I in my satin; he in black and white?
~ Virgina Woolf
For the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty.
~ Virginia Woolf
The green garden, moonlit pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky, across which, as the horns are joined by trumpets and supported by clarions there rise white arches firmly planted on marble pillars...
~ Virginia Woolf
And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves.
~ Virginia Woolf
standing, as now, lean as a knife
~ Virginia Woolf
Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness incarnation.
~ Virginia Woolf
But she's extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a young woman who, as she passed Gordon's statue, seemed, Peter Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.
~ Virginia Woolf
Then there's Queen Victoria, like a large tea cosy, & Wellington, sleek as a mastiff with paw extended . . .
~ Virginia Woolf
Damn it, Madam, you are loveliness incarnate," which was the truth.
~ Virginia Woolf
She wore ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid's dress. Lolloping on the waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned, caught her scarf in some other woman's dress, unhitched it, laughed, all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the waves.
~ Virginia Woolf
Bond Street fascinated her; Bond Street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shops; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for fifty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.
~ Virginia Woolf
Bond Street la fascinaba; Bond Street muy de mañana en plena temporada; sus banderas ondeando; sus tiendas; sin excesos; sin resplandor; un rollo de tweed en la tienda donde su padre se había comprado los trajes durante cincuenta años; unas cuantas perlas; el salmón encima de un taco de hielo.
~ Virginia Woolf
Running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Caress the detail, the divine detail.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
The sense of literary creation is to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
Egy elegáns elsÅ' osztályú fülkében, egyik keszty?s kezünket bedugva a bársony ajtóhurokba, könny? nagyon világlátott embernek érezni magunkat, miközben nézzük a szorgosan elsuhanó tájat.
~ Vladimir Nabokov
behind the awful juvenile clichés, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate
~ Vladimir Nabokov