Quotes About Contrasts

New Orleans is a great place, a place of celebration. But on the other hand, there's a reality to it, there's violence, there's misguided youth.

Remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty?

These and other tools help poems call our attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes--when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.

In the great cities, winter glitters with art and feasting. But poetry, the country cousin, sees only the dearth of the fields.

For instance, as the police arrive, there are girls lined along the street, girls in miniskirts, thigh-highs, and halter tops. (The sea wrack Milton hoses from the sidewalk every morning includes the dead jellyfish of prophylactics and the occasional hermit crab of a lost high heel.)

Who could believe that in such overwhelming beauty exists such fragility?

Delhi is fresh, brazen and more glamorous as compared to subtle Mumbai.

Was im großen Hotel erlebt wird, das sind keine runden, vollen, abgeschlossenen Schicksale. Es sind nur Bruchstücke, Fetzen, Teile; hinter den Türen wohnen Menschen, gleichgültige oder merkwürdige, Menschen im Aufstieg, Menschen im Niedergang; Glückseligkeiten und Katastrophen wohnen Wand an Wand. Die Drehtür dreht sich, und was zwischen Ankunft und Abreise erlebt wird, das ist nichts Ganzes" (S. 309)

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

I made myself famous by writing 'songs' and lyrics about the beauty of the things I did and ugliness, too.

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends; it is with them that I take those walks in the country at the end of the day. I am also on friendly terms with Deadly Playfulness, Playful Playfulness, Serious Playfulness, Serious Seriousness, and Sheer Sheerness. From the last, however, I get nothing; he just wrings my heart and leaves me speechless.

When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh's family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects.

You hear this a lot in America, especially when you're complaining about televisions, or loud music, or, more common still, television and loud music together in the same room. "People like it." "Yes," I always want to say, "but they're the wrong people.

People are always arguing: New York or L.A.? They're both great places, you know.

Sad people dislike the happy, and the happy the sad the quick thinking the sedate, and the careless the busy and industrious.

Great beliefs always come out of the sewers of cities, not out of the towers of the ziggurats.

The strangest thing in all man's travelling is that he should carry about with him incongruous memories. There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only who is foreign, and now and then, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.

I'm taking Viagra and drinking prune juice - I don't know if I'm coming or going.

With Lillian, ironically, the Bowmans had reached their highest pinnacle in having married her to Marcus, Lord Westcliff. No one could have believed that the reserved and powerful earl would have wed a headstrong girl like Lillian. But Westcliff had seen beneath Lillian's brash façade to the vulnerability and fiercely loving heart she tried so hard to concede.

Like a domestic cat, purring on the sofa by day, but by night, a strutting queen, a natural killer, disdainful of her other life.

A caress is to a shiver as dusk is to a lightning flash.

Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.

Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites? I

People like our stuff, some people hate it, but that's like anything, right? Some people love donuts, some people are allergic to 'em.